


Etched on Every Wall

by Pteropoda (SilentP)



Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Generation One
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Background Relationships, Child Neglect, Cybertron doesn't have CPS, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Escaping an abusive relationship, Found Family, Gen, M/M, Mentors, Origin Story, Panic Attacks, Verbal Abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-27
Updated: 2018-04-05
Packaged: 2018-05-29 11:56:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 40,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6373795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilentP/pseuds/Pteropoda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before he became Wheeljack, R2071 knew who he was going to be. It was who he was sparked to be, after all: Assistant to Shockswitch, one of Iacon University's most prominent engineers. It was who Shockswitch had been training him to be from the moment he had come online, and it would make Shockswitch happy, if only R2 could learn to do anything right. </p><p>Then, before he became Wheeljack, R2071 met Ratchet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. R2071: New Day, New Life

**Author's Note:**

> THIS FIC: also known as Wheeljack, before he became the master of explosions, Ratchet's friend and partner in ~~crime~~ Dinobot making, and everybody's favorite Autobot engineer. I've been sitting on this fic for a while, waiting to post it. It's still not really done, but this chapter is ready to share.
> 
> Vaguely inspired by a kinkmeme prompt. Many of the background details are similar, but it takes off in its own direction pretty quickly, so I wouldn't call it a fill. If you're interested, you can find the prompt [here.](http://tfanonkink.livejournal.com/10462.html?thread=10006238#t10006238) Ei/eir pronouns used for some random side characters in this story are directly inspired by their use in raisedbymoogles and Gemma_Inkyboots' works. Check out the [Alt-Vos Saga](http://archiveofourown.org/series/377110) for examples and an interesting fic. 
> 
> Keep the tagged warnings in mind, please. Specific warnings for what to expect in each chapter will appear in the notes at the top. For the first chapter, this means: a confrontation between characters that threatens to turn physical but doesn't. A number of scenes of heavily implied neglect/abuse, though R2/Wheeljack doesn't think of them in those terms. There are also some panic attacks, again not noted by the characters as such.

“R2071.”

The sound of his serial number being called made R2 jerk. He nearly knocked over a pile of datapads lifting his helm—when had he let it drop?—to look in dismay at the mess in front of him. He couldn’t remember when he’d fallen into recharge, but his HUD flashed with sickly warnings of low energy levels. Behind those, older alerts about spark stability and system stresses had piled up, and now filled his vision with a dull yellow haze.

The medic had told him the warnings would stop soon if he ignored them, so R2 dismissed them all.

“R2071, I called for you,” the voice repeated. R2 winced. When he turned around, Shockswitch was looming over him. “Shall I repeat myself a third time?”

 “No sir,” R2 stammered. His mentor did not look pleased with him, so he scrambled for his work. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep, I was doing the work you wanted, but I think—“

“I didn’t want excuses,” Shockswitch interrupted. He held out a hand, expectant.

R2 cut himself off so quickly his vocalizer clicked. Finally, he stacked up the datapads he’d completed and handed the pile over to Shockswitch, who looked through it with an expression that R2 couldn’t read.

It was a smaller stack than it should have been. Volumes five and six of _A Database of Mechanical Engineering,_ marked with the appropriate tags to indicate that the contents had been downloaded and integrated without interruption, the completed Integration Application Test for the fifth, and the partially finished one for the sixth.

It would have been a workload spread out over five orns before his frame upgrade, but Shockswitch had made it clear from the moment he’d onlined his optics in his adult frame that he had higher expectations for R2 now. The data files alone would have taken three orns to download before, but now his specs claimed he could download and integrate the same amount of data ten times as fast, and Shockswitch did not want to waste any time putting that new speed to use.

Trying to download so much information had given him a processor ache but that, like the frame aches and the spark fluctuations, was supposed to pass with time.   

After scrutinizing the datapads for long enough to make R2 nervous, Shockswitch shook his helm and put them aside. “It will have to do. Take the one you didn’t finish,” he said. He produced a stack from his subspace, along with a portable memory core. “If you finish it, you’ll download the next volume and complete the integration tests. Now come on, we’re already late.”

“Late?”

Shockswitch gave him a look. R2 ducked his helm and collected up the pile of datapads without another word. Shockswitch hated interruptions, and he’d already done enough to disappoint Shockswitch today.

He wouldn’t be able to finish the rest of the Applied Integration tests in a single day, not for three more volumes, but he grabbed all of them anyway. Better to take too much than to have nothing to do.

“To the University,” Shockswitch said. He was already leaving R2’s room, and R2 scrambled to follow. The sudden movement brought a wave of dizziness that nearly had him tripping on his chair as he stood. He shook his head, trying to get his gyros to calibrate, then hurried after his guardian. Shockswitch was already moving down the hallway toward the entrance, still talking. “The term begins today, and I have responsibilities that cannot be ignored. Put those in your subspace,” he ordered, waving a hand at the stack R2 still carried.

Right, a subspace. He’d forgotten that his new frame had a subspace generator. In his interim frame, he’d gotten used to Shockswitch holding everything for him.

Shockswitch was still talking, though. “Now prepare that map of Iacon I had you download. Your transformation protocols should have settled by now.”

R2 nearly dropped his stack of datapads. “I thought the medic said I wasn’t supposed to transform yet!”

 Shockswitch scoffed. “They always say that because they want you in observation longer. That’s how they get rich, you know. There’s nothing wrong with transforming a few days after a frame transfer. Now hurry up, or we’ll be late. We’re going to hit traffic as it is.”

It took some poking for him to figure out how to actually operate his subspace, while Shockswitch watched with one pede tapping out his impatience. As soon as he’d found it and stored the datapads inside (why was the generator in his side, instead of in his hand? It seemed inefficient) Shockswitch turned and hurried them out of the apartment.

Everything looked smaller now. In his interim frame, R2 had only been as tall as Shockswitch’s hip, but now they were the same height. He didn’t have to jog to keep up with Shockswitch’s fast pace either, though he did have to lengthen his stride to keep from falling behind as Shockswitch led them out of the building.

Before, when they’d needed to go somewhere, Shockswitch had called up a transport or led them to the loading dock for the shuttle. R2 had enjoyed those trips, especially when he was alongside a window and could look out at the tall buildings of Iacon and the many frames weaving around them on the roads.

This time, Shockswitch led him right up to the street and stepped out into the transformation lane.

It was only when he was standing by the curb that R2 hesitated.

He watched as Shockwave’s frame morphed with a series of whirrs and clunks. The hovers at his elbows and heels came down, balancing him as his arms created his bumper and his chestplate shifted back until his helm was hidden safely away, and there he was, in vehicle mode.

“Well?” Shockswitch demanded.

R2 flinched. He stumbled as he stepped down into the street, caught his balance, and triggered his transformation protocols moments before he’d finished turning. He cried out in surprise as his feet transformed out from under him, and he was falling, only it wasn’t his helm that hit the ground, it was his tires, something under his hood felt wrenched—his ankle, he realized with a start, something must have twisted it as he came down, and he wasn’t seeing with his optics, they’d deactivated somewhere along the way and he had his haptic sensors trained around him instead. He had haptic sensors! And a long-distance scanner that caught on Shockswitch’s sleek blue form in front of him.

“Stay behind me,” Shockswitch ordered, then pulled out into the street.

R2 followed with a jolt of acceleration, fumbling in his processor for the Iacon Roadway Instructions Shockswitch had made him download. Much to his relief, the roadway was mostly empty, which allowed him to focus on following Shockswitch at the proper distance the roadway protocols called for. He kept slipping up when Shockswitch slowed down to merge onto a different street or sped up as a curve allowed.

He couldn’t imagine trying to accomplish it in the traffic Shockswitch had mentioned, and he suddenly felt grateful that Shockswitch had insisted so strongly on leaving the apartment in such a timely fashion.

Still, the further they went the more proximity pings R2 got, and more and more vehicles kept registering in his peripheral sensors. At one point, a little purple speedster even tried to edge into the gap between him and Shockswitch, but with a brief and panicked burst of speed, R2 had edged forward to close the space. He thought the speeder was going to shout at him, but the mech just slowed and slid in behind him without comment.

With everything going on around him, R2 didn’t have so much as a spare processor thread to turn on the map of Iacon. So, when Shockswitch whipped around a bend and abruptly shifted two lanes to the far left side of the road, R2 let out a startled cry and rushed to follow.

The angry shout registered at the same time his proximity sensors started screaming at him, and R2 realized in a flash of terrifying clarity that he was about to crash into another mech. Panicked, he jerked to the right, tires screeching as he slammed his brakes. It sent him skidding onto the transformation lane, where he nearly slammed into the barrier, and only one last panicked twist of his wheels kept him from smashing his bumper.

Spark pounding with panic, he remained where he’d stopped. His sensors were feeding him static, and the noise of the highway beside him seemed far too loud.

“What the slag were you doing?” someone shouted at him. It took two reboots for his sensors to register that there was a mech in root mode in front of him. It wasn’t Shockswitch. This mech was red, not blue and bronze, and a size class above Shockswitch. R2 realized abruptly that he couldn’t see his guardian anywhere. It was only him and the mech he’d nearly hit.

The mech slapped a palm onto his hood. “Are you listening to me? Did you forget to turn on your processor today, or something? What the Pit was that stupid stunt you were pulling?”

“I— I—“ R2’s systems had abandoned him. His vocalizer was spitting static so badly he could hardly get words out. “I was—“

His comm beeping startled him into rocking back on his tires. “ _R2, I thought I told you to follow me. Where are you?”_

R2’s engine whined in distress. “I don’t know,” he admitted.

“You don’t know?” The mech in front of him yelped.

“ _Use the map to ping me. I know you remember how this works,”_ Shockswitch said.

He sounded furious. Miserably, R2 sent the GPS ping to Shockswitch. Hopefully he would be able to interpret it just fine, but right now R2 couldn’t make out anything of the map. Shockswitch was going to punish him, he was sure. He’d told R2 that he should keep up, and now they were sure to be late.

The mech had both hands on his hood now, and R2 rocked back on his shocks as the mech pushed down. “Well, are you going to answer?” the mech demanded.

“What is happening here?” said another voice, from behind the orange mech. It was immediately followed by an Enforcer’s identifying ping. The angry mech stepped back, and R2 caught a glimpse of the Enforcer, painted in severe black and white, looking sharply between them.  

 “This idiot swerved and almost slammed into me!” Orange said indignantly.

“Were you hurt, sir?” The Enforcer seemed to be scanning for damage. The mech was still scowling, but the question seemed to settle him some.

“No,” he said, then shot R2 a look. “No thanks to him.”

R2 found himself sinking low on his wheels as the Enforcer’s optics turned toward him once again. “Is that right?” ei asked, stiffly.

“I…” he had to force his vocalizer to reboot, but even then, the static wasn’t gone. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, but Shockswitch told me to follow him, and he pulled out so quickly that I couldn’t keep up…” the Enforcer was giving him a strange look, so he forced his vocalizer into a reboot before he could keep rambling. “It was my fault. Sorry.”

That look hadn’t left the Enforcer’s faceplates. If anything, it had spread to the orange mech as well. The Enforcer crossed eir arms, tapping one servo against eir plating. “How long have you had your vehicle mode?”

“Two orns,” he admitted. “I haven’t used it before now, but I have all of the software for it, I swear.”

The orange mech looked thunderous, and R2 sank low on his wheels, cringing in anticipation of more shouting. Even the Enforcer was frowning right at him, now.

Whatever they were thinking, neither of them managed to actually say something before Shockswitch came barreling his way out of the river of traffic. “What is going on here?” he insisted, the moment he was in root mode. He advanced on the Enforcer like an ion storm, but the Enforcer held eir ground. “What did this mech do to my charge, officer?”

It wasn’t the Enforcer that responded. The orange mech, clearly unphased by Shockswitch’s anger, butted aggressively into Shockswitch’s space.  “What the frag were you thinking, dragging a new driver onto the Iacon freeway? Pit, I saw you roaring across the lanes. It’s a miracle no one’s in pieces!” The orange mech was bearing down on Shockswitch now, nearly yelling straight in his faceplates, but Shockswitch didn’t so much as twitch. If anything, he looked even more disdainful as he looked down his nasal ridge at the mech in front of him. Things seemed about to escalate when the Enforcer stepped between the two.

“If you do not intend to file charges, sir, then I must ask you to move on,” the Enforcer said, calm and placating. At first, it seemed like the orange mech would continue shouting, but then he backed down with a shake of his helm.

“Not worth it,” he grumbled. “Pit, practically a youngling…”

With one last fierce scowl in Shockswitch’s direction, the mech transformed and gunned his engine, sliding back into traffic and speeding off.

The Enforcer watched him go before turning back to Shockswitch. R2 hunkered down miserably. A confrontation was coming, he just knew it. Shockswitch would not let this go easily. From the tense set of the Enforcer’s backstruts, R2 thought that ei knew it too.

“Am I correct in assuming that this mech is your ward, citizen?” the Enforcer asked.

“I already said so.” Shockswitch said, crossing his arms. “But of course you’re going to make me provide proof anyway.”

“It is policy,” the Enforcer pointed out. Shockswitch didn’t look happy, but he must have transferred a file, because the Enforcer nodded.

“Everything seems to be in order,” ei said. Then ei looked to R2. “All right. As there was no crash, and no laws have been broken, I’m not going to fine you or put it on record.”

“Thank you,” R2 stammered, dizzy with relief.

He thought he saw a flicker of a smile on the Enforcer’s face, but before he could be sure of it, the mech had turned back to Shockswitch and was once more the stern Enforcer.  

“However, if this happens again, I will be charging you with reckless driving on public roads and endangerment of other mechanisms,” he said to Shockswitch firmly. “I recommend you travel on less busy roads until your charge has had a chance to acclimate, and I’m requiring you to stay along the side until the traffic has cleared up.”

“But we’ll be late!” Shockswitch hissed. R2 couldn’t see the Enforcer’s faceplates, but something ei did had Shockswitch stepping back, his grimace frozen in place. “Very well,” his mentor said, sickly sweet. “Thank you for advice, officer.”

When it became obvious that the Enforcer wasn’t about to leave, Shockswitch stepped past him and loomed over R2.  “We’re going to be waiting for quite a while. In the meantime, you can continue working.”

The Enforcer was still watching them, and Shockswitch was using his public voice. It didn’t mean Shockswitch was going to forget the incident, but maybe now he’d have time to calm down. “Yes, sir,” R2 said quickly. At least his voice wasn’t skipping and shaking any more.

This time, he didn’t have to rush to trigger his transformation sequence. His front axle twinged a bit as his bumper split apart to form his pedes, and he had to sit down quickly when his ankle throbbed warningly under his weight, but it didn’t seem to worry Shockswitch or the Enforcer, so he ignored it.

Shockswitch was staring expectantly at the Enforcer, now. R2 carefully busied himself with removing the incomplete data integration test from his subspace.

“Surely there are more important things for an Enforcer to be doing than keeping an eye on two mecha complying with his requests, officer,” Shockswitch said. “I do apologize for my snappish behavior, but my ward’s safety is very important to me.”

The Enforcer didn’t look particularly happy with the idea, but with one final glance between R2 and Shockswitch, ei collapsed down into alt-mode. “I don’t want to hear about any more incidents like this,” ei warned the both of them.

“Don’t worry, officer. You won’t,” Shockswitch said, in that too-sweet voice he had when he was irritated at someone. R2 darted worried glances up at him, but Shockswitch did nothing more as the Enforcer merged gracefully into the riot of vehicles that was the freeway.

Once he was gone, Shockswitch sneered. “Tch. Who does that Enforcer think ei is? Some rookie cop, questioning me like that…” His optics fell on R2, and his scowl deepened. “Didn’t I tell you to start working?”

R2 flinched, and fumbled to activate the datapad. He couldn’t remember which question he’d stopped on. As he looked through the completed questions, he realized that he couldn’t even remember finishing most of them, and the process by which he’d arrived at an answer was usually completely incomprehensible. Just how long had he been working in a daze?

Worriedly, he restarted the entire examination. Shockswitch had only glanced over the set earlier, but he would be correcting it in painstaking detail as soon as they returned from this trip, R2 was sure. If he’d messed up any questions due to tired carelessness, Shockswitch would give him twice as much work to make sure he didn’t make the same error again. Double checking his work would slow him down in completing the pad now, but Shockswitch hated wrong answers even more than he hated delays.

The first two problems he’d answered correctly, but by the third R2 was finding little mistakes where he’d run an equation with the wrong number, or the wrong formula. The fourth question started with the wrong premise entirely—he’d used diagrams for an 1100 cc engine instead of a 1094 cc, and the mistakes only continued from there. When he finally moved on to the fifth question, he didn’t bother to look over the answer, he just erased his work and restarted completely.

While he worked, he tapped his fingers along the side of the datapad, and tried not to bounce his knee. Shockswitch was distracted by a datapad of his own, but if he noticed R2 fidgeting he’d start in on a lecture about being distracted. He’d scoffed the first time R2 had stumbled through an explanation that it was easier to think when his hands were moving, so now R2 just gripped the sides of the datapad tightly and tried to keep his tapping fingers quiet as he worked.

He’d nearly finished the sixth problem when a sharp tap against his pauldron startled him so badly he nearly dropped his datapad.

Shockswitch harrumphed, and R2 clutched the datapad. He wasn’t finished yet! Was Shockswitch really going to look over his answers already? But Shockswitch didn’t demand to see the evaluation. He was getting to his pedes instead.

“The traffic’s gone, so put that away and transform,” Shockswitch ordered.

R2 froze.

He couldn’t. He couldn’t get back on the road. His vents were stalling at the thought of it, and his entire frame began heating with stress. He was going to crash and hurt someone, and this time the Enforcer wouldn’t be so willing to let it go.

“R2071!” Shockswitch snapped, and R2 startled to realize that Shockswitch was standing in front of him, optics snapping with impatience. “We are not going to waste the rest of the day here at the side of the highway!”  

R2’s first attempt to answer came out as a weak whimper, one he could see already was irritating Shockswitch. Before he could try again, Shockswitch had physically grabbed him, and was tugging him upright.

“Transform,” he ordered.

R2 wanted to run. Instead, he obeyed, folding himself down into alt-mode. His ankle hurt, and his plating scraped together, but he managed to get into vehicle mode without any new pain.

 “Now follow me,” Shockswitch said, transforming into his own alt mode and pulling out without any hesitation into the street. R2 could feel his gears grinding, but seeing Shockswitch’s taillights pulling away had him jolting into motion, afraid of being left behind again.

R2 nearly sent himself into the barrier along the edge as he jolted forward. By the time he’d straightened out his wheels, Shockswitch was more than five frame lengths ahead of him, and R2 had to push his engine hard to catch up. By the time he managed to slide into place behind Shockswitch, he was in the midst of the road, with other vehicles around him on every side.    

The first time another mech pulled up next to him, he flinched, and only just managed to keep from spilling into the next lane. The next time it happened, he didn’t move quite so far, but he still scooted over toward the lines. All of his sensors were on high alert, straining to take in detail, both to keep Shockswitch’s taillights in sight and to keep the vehicles surrounding him in range.

He was so focused on keeping close to Shockswitch that when the mech pulled to a halt and transformed, R2 flinched. Surely he’d been good this time. He’d kept up, and no one had so much as honked at him, so why were they stopping?

“Get up, we’re here,” Shockswitch said, gesturing impatiently.

Oh.

Sheepishly, R2 extended his sensors away from his frame enough to take in the building they had pulled up alongside. It was bigger than anywhere R2 had ever seen before, bigger even than the building where Shockswitch’s apartments were, bigger than the place they had gone to upgrade his frame. His processor spun with the size of it.

Quickly, he pulled himself through the transformation, wincing at the scrape of his panels against one another but forcing past it. His ankle still twinged, but it didn’t threaten to give out under him this time, so he ignored it in favor of staring up in awe. Even in root mode this building and all the ones around it rose up into the sky like pillars.

Shockswitch turned on his heel the moment R2 was in his root mode, and R2 had to hurry to follow him again. He nearly tripped on the curb and had to limp a few steps as his ankle protested until he was at Shockswitch’s heel. Shockswitch was moving along with the crush of mechs, cutting through the crowds in the building just as easily as he had on the highway. R2 didn’t have a map, and didn’t know where they were going, so he just kept his optics trained on Shockswitch’s distinctive colors and tried to keep up.

He was watching Shockswitch so closely he didn’t even notice the door they were going through until it almost slammed into his face. He thought he heard someone snickering nearby and hurried through, his shoulders hunching with embarrassment.  

When he hurried through the door, he cast around for Shockswitch, only to find his mentor watching him with a frown. The room wasn’t another hallway as R2 had been expecting, but rather a neat little office with a clearly expectant secretary sitting at the desk.

“About time,” Shockswitch said gruffly. “Now come over here. We need to register you so that I can get to work.”

“It will take some time for the system to validate,” the secretary said brightly, “but I have the paperwork for you.” She was nodding toward R2.

 “Yes, yes, that’s fine. He’ll be with me today,” Shockswitch said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Just give us the form.”

The secretary held the datapad out in R2’s direction, but Shockswitch deftly snapped it up and gestured the both of them to the nearby seats. R2 fidgeted, but didn’t protest. He had no idea what to do with it anyway.  

Shockswitch seemed to know exactly what to do. He scrolled through the datapad filling out information, and it wasn’t long before he was holding it out to R2.

“Here,” Shockswitch said. “This needs to be encoded to your signature.”

R2 stared at the datapad. The screen was a blank green, with no instructions or touchpad for him to interact with. “How do I…”

“Just put your hand on it,” Shockswitch said, grabbing R2’s wrist to make him do just that. R2 let himself be moved, and held still until the datapad chirped and the screen flashed back to the form that Shockswitch had been filling out. “Good,” Shockswitch said, and took the pad back without preamble. “Now you stay here. I’m going to make sure this gets accepted.”

R2 took the opportunity to slump in his seat. His cabling was tense and achey, and his ankle still hurt, though it was beginning to fade. Whatever they were doing today, R2 hoped there wasn’t much more walking involved.

“R2071, we are leaving,” Shockswitch called. Stifling a wince as he got back to his feet, R2 followed him out.  

Some of the immense crowd had disappeared, or maybe they were moving away from the main buildings of the University. It should have been a chance to look around the place more, but the bright lights were stabbing into his optics, and every little sound was echoing through his helm by now, so he followed Shockswitch with his helm down.  

Shockswitch herded him into an office, and pointed him into a chair before R2 had really realized that they were _here_.

Shockswitch’s office—it had to be his office—looked exactly the way their apartments did. The lights were up on their brightest setting, enough to make the walls glow, and the shelves were lined with datapads, and a few holographic displays of projects Shockswitch had designed. Everything was arranged just so around the desk, even the little side table and the second chair that Shockswitch had pointed him to.

 “You stay there,” Shockswitch said, gathering up a number of datapads from the shelf. “I have things to do. I expect you to remain here and finish your work.”

R2 nodded, then looked up in surprise Shockswitch walked back to the door. “Where are you going?”

“To class,” Shockswitch said.

“But—“ R2 protested, only for Shockswitch to close the door with a sharp click. No mention of when he’d be back, or where his class was.

R2 looked around nervously, and hunched further into his chair. Maybe there was a schedule somewhere in the office, but R2 didn’t want to mess up Shockswitch’s neat piles.

Shockswitch would come back, he reasoned. He had to. He wasn’t going to leave R2 alone for the rest of the day. If nothing else, he still needed to check that R2 had finished the IA test. Still, it was hard not to feel lost and alone. Shockswitch had never just left him like this before.

 With one last glance toward the door, he turned his attention back to his datapad, rubbed at his optics, and started to work.

The shakiness from before had become a dull, consuming throb that refused to go away, even when he offlined his optics. He still had an integration test to finish.

It did not go easily. Digging out the formulas and equations he needed from his databanks had turned into a lengthly process, especially since remembering where in those files it was stored, and keyword searches were time-consuming if he could remember the necessary phrases in the first place. Worse than that, the bright screen of his datapad was hurting his optics, and turning it down only did so much.

It felt like it took forever, but by the time he’d finally finished all of the questions and checked his work (two more errors, but at least they weren’t in the work he’d already redone) Shockswitch still hadn’t returned.

R2 hesitated to set the datapad aside, but eventually he pulled out the portable memory core. Shockswitch had made it clear that he wanted R2 to keep working, even if that meant downloading the next volume of _A Database of Mechanical Engineering._

Setting up the memory core was the work of moments. He set the little cube up on his table and pulled his chair closer so that he wouldn’t accidentally yank out the cord, but he hesitated on the verge of actually plugging the data cable into his occipital port.

It was silly to be nervous. He’d done this plenty of times in his interim frame. He’d even done it in this frame, yesterday when he’d downloaded the sixth volume.  

But he’d never done it without Shockswitch there just in case something went wrong. It wasn’t _supposed_ to go wrong, but R2 still wished Shockswitch would come back, even if he ignored R2 to do work of his own.

Stalling until his mentor arrived wouldn’t make Shockswitch happy, though, so he closed his optics tight and snapped the plug into place before he lost his nerve. The downloads for the next three volumes were there waiting for him, terabytes and terabytes of information.

Yesterday he’d still been getting used to his new frame, R2 reasoned with himself. Surely it would be better now that he’d adjusted. If Shockswitch thought he was ready to drive, then surely a data download would be just fine. Holding onto that thought, he initiated the download.

All awareness of his frame disappeared as a flood of information slammed into his processor. His chronometer, his haptic sensors, everything down to his energon regulation systems seemed to disappear under the tide of the download rushing into his processor until he was aware of nothing else.

His panicked attempts to cancel the download did nothing. He couldn’t feel his frame, couldn’t even see to try and manually disconnect from the memory core. _Shockswitch,_ he tried to call out, but his mentor wasn’t there, couldn’t do anything to help him. He could do nothing but try to keep from going offline, and wait for it to end.

The download stopped as abruptly as it had started. R2’s optics flickered back on, but the data wasn’t processing correctly. His HUD was filled with errors, bright amber and red alerts that he knew were bad but couldn’t begin to do anything about.

His optics rebooted, and he found himself staring at the floor of Shockswitch’s office. His entire helm was ringing like someone had taken a hammer to it, and moving only made it worse. R2 whimpered and hunched in his seat, trying to hide his optics from the bright overhead lights.

As he cowered, hiding from the room around him, eventually the throbbing ache began to take up less of his attention. The shivering clatter of his plating eased, and the warnings that had filled his HUD disappeared into the background.

R2 reached up with shaky hands to unplug the cable from his helm. Even with his limited experience with downloads, he knew that this one had been something much worse than the ones that he had experienced under Shockswitch’s supervision. Delicate probing at the material contained in his memory banks revealed why. He hadn’t just downloaded the next necessary lesson, he’d ended up with the entire memory core’s material in his processor.

Shockswitch was supposed to have set the core to only download one at a time. It should have done the same thing this time. Something had clearly gone wrong, but R2 was hesitant to plug back into the console to try and figure out what. The entire thing might try to download a second time, and his tanks roiled in protest at the thought.

When he finally uncurled from his chair, the first thing he saw was the datapad set out on the table in front of him, and he had to choke back a whine at the sight of it. The thought of staring at the screen while he worked had his processor aching sharply, but Shockswitch would want him to keep working.

Except… He had to let the data integrate before he could do the integration tests. Usually Shockswitch told him to track his progress with the integration, and access each new section as it became available, just to be sure. But that didn’t make the integration go any faster. Maybe, if he just let it run… He would still do the integration test when it finished, and while he waited he could allow the stabbing pain in his processor to fade.

Moving gingerly, R2 resettled himself in the chair, with his legs pulled up and his forehelm pressed against his knees. His ankle didn’t like the pressure, but with his optics offline he felt less like he was being stabbed in the processor.

He couldn’t say how long he stayed like that, just that the pounding, too-full feeling in his processor never went away. His HUD pinged him with low charge and low energy warnings occasionally, but he ignored them. He wasn’t supposed to recharge now, and even if he wanted to, the pounding in his helm probably wouldn’t let him. And even if he knew where to get energon, his tank cramped painfully at the thought of putting anything into it.

Shockswitch would have a lecture for him when he got back, but he was already going to be lecturing him about the incident on the highway. Even the thought of the punishment that would follow wasn’t enough to get R2 to lift his helm. He didn’t mind being in trouble, if only it meant that he got to go home.


	2. Ratchet: Burning the midnight oil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Between his work as a planet-renowned surgeon at Iacon General Hospital and teaching at Iacon University, Ratchet wasn't always familiar with the students or professors in Iacon University's medical school, but he was pretty sure he'd never run into this one before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aside from the general fic warnings, just some medical warnings this time! Poor Wheeljack has a first encounter with stress-induced medical conditions.

If there was any benefit to being at the University this late, in Ratchet’s opinion, it was that the place was empty. There was no traffic on the roads in. The walkways to the buildings were clear of crowds. Even the buildings were dim, and only the sheer size of everything gave any indication of just how busy the place would become.

It was the middle of the off-shift. Most of Iacon had returned to their berths by now, to recharge in preparation for the next busy orn.

Not so for Ratchet.

He’d finished his work at the hospital—an exhausting shift in the Emergency Room, full of surgeries and welding and designing follow-up treatments and occasionally lecturing mecha who should have known better than to try trick driving on the highway. The only saving grace was that there had been few major accidents, and those ones had been nonfatal. Ratchet had left the hospital tired but grimly satisfied.

He should have headed back to his shabby apartment and his berth after that, but he had a lesson plan to finish preparing, and if he didn’t do it now he’d pass out and recharge until his next shift started, and by then it would be too late to finish anything.

The medical building (it had some other name, some Senator who’d donated a lot of money, but Ratchet never bothered to remember it) was locked, but Ratchet’s ident codes let him in without a problem. The trip from the ground floor up to his office wasn’t a short one, but it was easier than fighting to fit in the elevator or winding his way through a gauntlet of colleagues who “just wanted a chat.”

If good relations between Iacon University and the  hospital weren’t so vital, Ratchet would have walked away from teaching long ago.

Instead, he was walking into his office in the middle of the night. The lights flickered on to reveal everything as he’d left it; the space was cluttered with datapad and hardlight projectors, along with the occasional physical model of some part or another of Cybertronian anatomy. Eventually he’d have to find the time to clean it up.

Not now, though. The datapads and the projector cube were waiting for him on his desk. Ratchet settled at his desk with a groan and the hiss of depressurizing hydraulics. His joints creaked as he did, and Ratchet grimaced at the sound. He’d been spending too much time on his pedes. He’d have to oil them later.

For now, he had work to do.

This particular lecture—on standard and non-standard fuel pumps and connections to a mech’s energon filtration system— was one he could do in his sleep. He’d done it after a full orn of emergency surgery, in fact. But one of the medical tech companies had come up with a new design that they were pushing hard, and Ratchet had to at least give some review of it from an academic standpoint before going into his personal working opinion, which was that the damn things were prone to failure and needed a lot more refinement before they were used in general frame construction, no matter how much money the company threw at advertising.

There were a number of clinical trials already being conducted. Finding them didn’t take long, but reading through them was another story. Ratchet caught himself nodding off in the middle of glancing one over.

Ratchet shook his helm and reset his optics. Tired or not, he wasn’t going to let himself fall asleep at his desk like that. With one last reset of his optics, he turned his attention back to the datapad, determined to finish his work quickly so he could go and get some proper recharge.

The second time it happened, he wasn’t even finished with reviewing the first trial. Ratchet set the datapad aside and rubbed at his optics. Sitting at his desk clearly wasn’t working.

There was a lounge for the professors down a floor somewhere, if he remembered correctly. It had couches and tables, even an energon dispenser. Ratchet rarely bothered to stop by it, but maybe some energon would help keep him alert. And a change of scenery couldn’t hurt, since the place would be empty of distractions.

His joints creaked again as he got up—oil, he was really going to have to remember that—but he picked up his datapad and locked his office up.

The hallway lights flicked on as he passed underneath them, activated by their motion sensors that illuminated his path in a little halo of light. The only sound was the background hum of the building and the occasional creak of Ratchet’s frame. It was far more peaceful than he was used to, and by the time he reached the lounge, the requests to initiate recharge had stopped popping up in his HUD.

He’d gotten used to the hallway’s motion sensor lights flickering on as he passed by, so Ratchet drew up short when he finally stepped into the lounge to find it already lit.

The overheads were at a dim glow, easy on the optics but bright enough for Ratchet to make out a mech, hunched over a datapad at one of the far couches. He wasn’t anyone Ratchet recognized. He had a plain white and grey frame with a plain gray facemask and an equally blank set of head fins. The datapad he was hunched over lit his face with a pale blue glow.

Ratchet huffed. He hadn’t been expecting anything else, but he hadn’t found his way to the lounge just to be driven away by an unexpected occupant. There were more than enough tables here for Ratchet to avoid invading this mech’s space, and they could both get on with their work and ignore each other.

So, grunting something vaguely like a greeting, Ratchet started toward the energon dispenser, fully intent on getting a cube and finishing his work.

He nearly dropped his datapad when the mech startled violently, staring up at Ratchet with wide optics and a hand clutched over his chestplate.

“Oh!” The mech yelped, stumbling up halfway to his pedes. “I didn’t—I didn’t expect anyone to be here!” he babbled. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to shout, I just didn’t expect to hear anything, and when I looked up…”

“I wasn’t expecting anyone either,” Ratchet interjected. “It’s rather late.”

To Ratchet’s surprise, the mech started to grab for his datapad, though he apparently still wasn’t over his scare, because his hands were shaking badly. “It is, you’re right. I should—probably go anyway, here, let me get out of your way.”

“Don’t bother,” Ratchet said, continuing to watch the mech. “I was only going to grab a cube and be on my way.” The shaking still hadn’t gone away, and his optics were blown wide and overbright. Clear signs of tiredness and an unpleasant scare, but Ratchet couldn’t help but notice that the mech still hadn’t taken his hand away from his chest plate, right where his spark chamber rested.

“Oh,” the mech warbled. Then he collapsed back into his seat, doubled over to clutch at his chest.

Ratchet cursed as he rushed forward. He ran a scan the moment he was in range, and grimaced over the results as he helped brace the mech upright. There were none of the signs of a system failure or an abrupt loss of spark chamber integrity, but something was wrong with the mech’s systems. They were fluctuating wildly, cycling between racing to the point of redlining and cutting out with a sudden jolt.  Nothing immediately fatal, but it certainly could be if he got any worse.

“Hey,” Ratchet snapped, kneeling down next to the mech to get a look at his optics. They were flickering now, and feverishly bright. “What’s your name?”

The mech mumbled something toward the floor, shivering seemingly unconsciously as his systems dropped from another engine-straining high.

“Artiu?” Ratchet repeated, his attention on the whining strain as the mech’s systems began to overclock again. “Right, Artiu. My name’s Ratchet, I’m a medic, and I need you to answer a few questions for me. Are you feeling a sharp pain anywhere?”

“No,” Artiu answered, quickly, his helm wobbling as he shook it. “Just aches.”

“Where?” Ratchet asked, bracing a hand on the mech’s shoulder.

“Spark,” Artiu gasped, his hand still pressed against his chestplate.

Ratchet could feel the tremors racing through the mech’s frame, and echoing from his engine. “Right, Artiu, I need to tell me what the alerts on your HUD are. Can you do that?”

It took a moment, but Artiu lifted his helm. His entire frame tensed as his engine rattled ineffectively. “There’s some amber ones. ‘Sparkmatter amplitude and frequency not registering’, ‘Sparkmatter energy not registering,’ and errors about fluctuating energy levels… I keep getting prompts to go into shutdown. Do you want all the yellow ones too?”

“No, that’s enough,” Ratchet said. The messages were alarming, and from the quaver in Artiu’s voice probably frightening to him, but when it came to issues with the spark, amber alerts were a good sign, relatively speaking. “Don’t initiate shutdown, but I need you to turn off any non-essential systems you have running. I’m going to plug in to your port and guide your systems through the process.”

“Okay,” Artiu said. His optics were still dangerously overbright. “Why?”

“Those alerts mean that your frame isn’t properly registering your spark. It’s trying to rescan, and the best way to let that happen is to let it,” Ratchet told him as he snapped a data cable into place in the mech’s thoracic port. “Tell me if anything changes with those warning colors.”

Artiu nodded, and hunched forward over his knees again.

Ratchet ignored that for the moment, to dive into the mech’s systems. He could tell that the mech’s energy was being routed differently in his frame as the non-essential programs powered down, and he redirected it, manually directing power the way a properly integrated spark should while he badgered the mech’s programming into focusing on establishing a steady connection with the spark chamber.

The energy rerouting worked almost too fast. Ratchet’s scans registered the change in energy patterns just before Artiu’s engine cut out with a sputter. Ratchet leaned forward and kept his sensory arrays trained on Artiu. Such a severe stop wasn’t good for a mech’s engine, and the backlash might just send Artiu’s spark into another spiral of fluctuations.

After a few worrying wobbles, things seemed to start evening out. When the intense glow of Artiu’s optics began to fade, Ratchet sat back, satisfied that the worst of the danger was passing, and disconnected himself from the port.

Artiu was slumping now, no doubt feeling the energy crash. “How’re those warning colors?” Ratchet asked.

Artiu’s helm snapped up like Ratchet had caught him in the midst of dozing off. The motion reminded Ratchet of the students in his class when he called them out in the middle of nodding off, and Ratchet wondered just who Artiu was, that he was working through the night when most sane mechs were at their homes. 

Then again, this wasn’t the first time Ratchet had seen a researcher push too hard in the middle of a project.

“Yellow,” Artiu said, interrupting Ratchet from his musings. “And I got a notice about reestablishing resonance.”

“Good,” Ratchet said, nodding in satisfaction. He took one last scan. All of Artiu’s systems were back into normal ranges, though there was plenty of lingering strain. “Your spark has settled, and your spark chamber is correctly registering it again. I’m not your physician, but I’d suggest getting a medic to check on your spark, and probably your sparkchamber as well,” Ratchet said. He shoved himself to his pedes, and headed over to the dispenser. He still needed that energon, and he had no doubt that Artiu could probably use a cube as well.  “That kind of disconnect isn’t normal, and it could mean your chamber isn’t properly calibrated for your spark.”

Artiu stirred as he shoved to his pedes with another creak of his joints, but the mech seemed to think better of getting up. It was probably for the best— even if his spark was better, Ratchet doubted the mech would be up to standing without his systems rebelling.

“It should be okay,” Artiu said hesitantly. “I only got switched to this frame a little while ago. They were careful with the spark chamber.”

Ratchet took a moment to start the dispenser before turning away to look over Artiu’s frame with a new optic. Full frame transfers were an intensive procedure, and not lightly undertaken. If it had been an emergency, a quick frame build would certainly explain the plain appearance. Artiu wouldn’t have had time to customize it to his tastes yet.

“That explains a few things,” Ratchet muttered as the cubes finished filling.

“What do you mean?” Artiu asked, watching Ratchet as he made his way back to the couch, energon cubes in hand.

Ratchet stared incredulously at Artiu. “Didn’t your medic tell you anything?” he asked, aghast. “Frame transfers are slag on your spark. From the looks of you, I’d say you’ve been working too hard, not recharging enough, and you might have gotten away with it in your old frame, but with your spark adjusting to an entirely new frame, you’re going to push yourself into an attack of frame dysphoria, maybe even a complete burnout.”

It was hard to tell with the faceplate, but Artiu looked one dire warning away from a full-fledged panic. Ratchet grimaced, but forced himself to sit back and lower his voice. Yelling wouldn’t do any good. “If this is the first time it’s happened, then your spark isn’t rejecting your frame, but if you push it too hard it just might.”

Artiu’s hand was back over his spark, pressing at his chestplate.

… And it wasn’t a good idea to stress out a mech who’d just had spark fluctuations. Ratchet sighed.

“For your health, I’d suggest resting for a while, then returning to your residence for a proper recharge,” he said. Artiu took the cube Ratchet held out to him, but he didn’t drink it.

“I can’t,” Artiu said. “I… not that I don’t appreciate the advice, but I really have to finish this.” He looked around, as though realizing for the first time that he wasn’t holding onto his datapad any longer. It had fallen to the side sometime during Artiu’s first collapse.

“Of course you need to finish it,” Ratchet grumbled. The datapad was by his pedes, its screen dark, so he picked the thing up. A quick tap to the dark screen brought up some diagram or other, but there were no cracks or warping of the screen. Ratchet set it down on the table. “There’s always just one more thing that needs to be done. Then one more after that, and so on until you’ve strained your spark to permanent damage.”

This time when Artiu looked up at him there was genuine fear in his optics. Ratchet bit his glossa. _You have the comforting manner of an interrogator, Ratchet._

“I’m supposed to turn the finished design in tomorrow, though,” Artiu said miserably. “Shockswitch wants it by morning.”

Ratchet paused. With the way he’d phrased it, Artiu didn’t sound like the fully-fledged researcher he’d first thought. That Shockswitch sounded more like an advisor, which made Artiu an apprentice or a research assistant, one whose advisor apparently hadn’t bothered to give him enough time off to recover from his frame transfer.

“How about this,” Ratchet said slowly. “I give you an official medical dispensation, and you hand that in the day after tomorrow, once you’ve had a nice long recharge.”

“You can do that?” Artiu asked. He’d frozen in the middle of picking up the datapad.

Ratchet pinged him his official certifications and watched as Artiu's optics jumped back to him, full of awe. “More than that, if it isn’t accepted, I can force the University to recognize it as valid and prevent it from causing any harm to your standing.”

Artiu looked between him, the datapad, and the squashy padding bolsters that lined the couch. When he lingered on the bolsters, Ratchet knew he’d won. “C’mon, kid, take a nap,” he said, sliding into one of the armchairs and flicking on his datapad.

“Okay,” Artiu mumbled. He didn’t even seem to realize that Ratchet had just called him kid, and Ratchet couldn’t help but wonder just how old he was, as he watched Artiu lie down. Carefully, as though testing their solidity, he lowered himself down, until he was sprawled across the length of the couch, his knees tucked up and his helm resting along the cushions by the armrest. His optics were already dimming.

Satisfied, Ratchet turned his attention to his datapad, and the last of his research. He’d completely lost track of where he’d been, but the energon was helping after all.

He’d finished one article when he looked up and found Artiu watching him with dim optics.

“I thought you were going to rest,” he said.

Artiu ducked his helm and hunched his shoulders, looking contrite. “Sorry,” he said, then winced, and cut off his vocalizer entirely.

Ratchet frowned, noticing the tension that had come over Artiu’s frame. “Does something hurt?” he asked.

“No,” Artiu said quickly. “You’re right, I should recharge.” He was picking at his fingerplates, Ratchet realizd, twisting them together and picking at the seams. It was an obvious nervous habit, and Ratchet had to bite his glossa before he could bark at Artiu to stop it before he damaged something.

“Don’t mind me,” he said instead. “It’s been a long shift, and I’m a crotchety old mechanism. If you can’t recharge, I can give you a program to help.”

Artiu shook his helm. “It’s not that. I just…” The fidgeting continued. “You don’t have to waste your time looking after me.”

“I can work and keep an optic on you at the same time, and I'd rather you have someone to keep an eye on you, after an attack like that,” Ratchet said. “I was planning on waking you up once I’d finished here. You’re not keeping me from my berth.”

Artiu didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t keep arguing. “It’s Ratchet, isn’t it?” he said instead. “Thank you.”

“It’s what I do, so you’re welcome,” Ratchet said with a wry grin. “Now get some rest.”

Artiu mumbled something, and lowered his helm. He could hear the mech moving as he settled, but he turned his attention down at his datapad, to give the kid time to settle. He waited until he heard the hum of systems switching into power saver mode to look up, and sure enough, the kid was dead asleep.

Ratchet shook his helm. It was a wonder that Artiu hadn’t gone into recharge earlier, with the degree of exhaustion Ratchet had recognized in his systems, but Ratchet still had plenty of work to finish before _he_ could think of recharging, so he leaned over his datapad and got to it.

The papers went by more efficiently now, though they were no less boring. Ratchet glanced up occasionally, but Artiu didn’t wake, though he shifted every so often. The random rustles of the mech shifting faded into an easy whisper of background noise.

Soon enough he’d finished the papers and worked the relevant information into his presentation, but he hesitated to actually wake Artiu. The mech was resting soundly even without a recharge berth, which was enough to make Ratchet think he desperately needed it. Even in the dim lights of the lounge, the scuffs across the mech’s frame, particularly his hands, were obvious. It looked like he hadn’t had time for maintenance since he was transferred.

_He’s not your student, and he’s not your patient, Ratchet._

Other than giving Artiu that medical exemption, there wasn’t much he could do here. He could recommend that Artiu take the day off, and get some rest. Considering the weight attached to his name as a medic, at the hospital and the University, he could be reasonably certain that it would be respected, but other than giving Artiu his comm code, he couldn’t exactly follow up. He certainly shouldn’t be sticking his hands into another mech’s business.

Still, he couldn’t quite shake his feeling of worry, so instead of waking Artiu up immediately, he started digging through the University servers for the medical exception form. Might as well get it done now, and give Artiu a little more time to recover before waking him up.

The form was not an easy one to find, and there was plenty of information that Ratchet couldn’t fill in yet, but he could enter his own, and he could definitely go into detail about why the exception was needed.

He was about ready to wake up Artiu when he heard the door opening, and he turned to find an unfamiliar mech, painted in electric blue and bronze, striding toward them.

“Artiu—“ the mech started to say. He cut himself off when he saw Ratchet, with a face like he’d just been served sour energon.

“You know him?” Ratchet asked. He kept his voice down, since the noise of the door apparently hadn’t been enough to wake Artiu.

The other mech didn’t spare the same consideration. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“Working,” Ratchet said, “but when I found him Artiu here was having spark fluctuations that nearly cascaded into a frame rejection.”

That was enough to draw the mech up short. “But he had his frame transfer two decaorns ago,” he said stiffly. “Rejections are only a danger within the first six orns.”

“Or any time during the following five decaorns, if a mech’s systems are under strain,” Ratchet countered sharply. The mech’s attitude was grating on him. “Has he been overworking since the frame transfer? You should probably be keeping an eye on him, if that’s the case. It’s not healthy for him.”

From the way the mech stiffened, Ratchet might as well have personally insulted him.

Ratchet heard a clatter from the side. When he turned to look, he saw Artiu struggling to right himself. He had knocked his datapad onto the floor, and was looking at the newcomer with groggy alarm.

 “Shockswitch! Sorry, I was—“

“Resting, on my advice,” Ratchet interrupted.

Shockswitch drew up, his expression stiff and cold. “I see,” he said. “In that case, I’m sure you’ll be happy to have him out of your way.” He turned toward Artiu. “It’s time for us to leave, anyway. I’ve already locked up the lab. You’ll have to bring your work home with you.”

“Okay,” Artiu said. He wobbled as he pushed himself to his feet, but caught his balance again quickly while Shockswitch waited, arms crossed.

The moment Artiu was on his pedes, Shockswitch was striding toward the door. Artiu grabbed for his datapad and started to rush after him.

“Kid, hold on a moment—“ Ratchet said, getting up himself.

Artiu paused, looking between Shockswitch’s back, already retreating out of the door, and Ratchet. “Sorry,” he blurted out, “I need to go. Shockswitch doesn’t like being kept waiting…Thank you. I promise I’ll try to keep it from happening again.”

“You’ve got my info if you need it,” Ratchet said. Artiu nodded, and gave one last wave and hurried out after Shockswitch, who’d already left.

“Frag,” Ratchet swore at the room in general. The incomplete form was still laid out in front of him, waiting for Artiu’s information. 

Ratchet wasn’t about to leave it unfinished. A quick search of the school directory didn’t list any results for a mech with the designation “Artiu”, no matter how many glyph-combinations he tried. Eventually Ratchet sat back with a growl. Either he’d been mishearing the name the entire time, or the mech had given him a nickname, but he wasn’t going to find him in the directory.

By now, it was long past the time that Ratchet should have been in his berth. He’d done what he reasonably could, he told himself, but it felt like an empty reassurance. There was still something he could do, he just didn’t want to do it.

He’d only interacted with Shockswitch for a few kliks, but Ratchet already disliked him. Most of it was the medical misinformation and outright denial about the danger Artiu had been in, but with the way the mech had interacted with Artiu rubbed him the wrong way.

Was Shockswitch Artiu’s advisor? He thought he remembered the mech mentioning the name earlier. If he was the one responsible for pushing Artiu to work himself to exhaustion, it would certainly explain his stiff reaction to Ratchet’s explanation.

But Shockswitch was his only option for getting the form to Artiu for the information it required. He wasn’t the only one who got cranky when he was tired, Ratchet reminded himself, and Shockswitch had shown up to look for Artiu and bring him home. For all he knew, his own exhaustion was making him misinterpret the situation entirely.  

When he searched Shockswitch’s name the one result that popped up was a Professor in the Engineering department. At first Ratchet thought there’d been a mistake, but sure enough, the accompanying image was the same mech with the bright blue paint job.

Ratchet stared at it. He’d hoped Shockswitch to be some sort of classmate of Artiu’s, not a fully certified professor and researcher.

 _Stop that_ , Ratchet told himself firmly. _You’re jumping to a diagnosis from incomplete information._ He knew better than to make assumptions, especially about things that were none of his business.

He attached the incomplete form to the message, made a note that it should be passed on to Artiu, and sent the thing off.

It was with a heavy, unsatisfied feeling in the pit of his tanks that Ratchet finished packing up his work. He’d done all he could, he told himself as he got to his pedes. He’d have to be satisfied with that.  


	3. R2: Taking the chance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> R2 recovers, and wonders about the medic that looked after him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took much longer than I wanted it to. Sorry, everyone! Life really got in the way this time around. Anyway, here's the next chapter, and we're back to R2's perspective. 
> 
> No specific warnings this time around, other than the general ones for the fic as a whole.

Shockswitch was waiting for R2 by the elevator with an expression as dark as an oncoming storm.

“Who was that?” he hissed. Before R2 could answer Shockswitch was grabbing him by the arm and yanking him forward into the elevator.

“He—he said his designation was Ratchet,” R2 stammered, pinging over the list of credentials Ratchet had sent him.

Shockswitch ignored them. “And what were you doing telling a _stranger_ about your frame transfer?” he demanded.

“He was just trying to help,” R2 said quietly, flinching back from the sharp light in Shockswitch’s optics. “My spark started aching, and my engine kept malfunctioning, but he made it stop. He said… could I really damage my spark if I strain my frame too much?”

 “Is that what he told you?” Shockswitch scoffed. “No, you’re not going to damage your spark just from a few late nights, and he’s not your medic. Without knowing any of the details, he shouldn’t go around saying such dire statements.”

“He just seemed worried,” R2 mumbled. Shockswitch wouldn’t lie to him, but he didn’t think Ratchet would either.

 “Worried or not, you shouldn’t trust the advice of a stranger that easily,” Shockswitch said sharply. R2 waited in nervous anticipation for more ranting, but Shockswitch fell silent as they waited for the elevator to open them again. R2 risked a glance at his mentor’s faceplates when the doors finally slid open for them. Shockswitch was still scowling, but something had changed.

“It’s time we went home,” Shockswitch said, much more quietly than before. “I assume you haven’t finished that plan, have you?” he asked, and barely waited for R2’s ashamed nod. “No, of course not. You’ll finish it tomorrow, then. We can’t fall behind schedule.”

“Yes, Shockswitch,” R2 said. He watched Shockswitch from beneath the ridges of his helm, but his mentor had turned away in silence. Was that _all_? Shockswitch was always upset when he hadn’t finished his projects on time, and this one was the biggest one yet. Shockswitch had already shouted at him about it twice, about working too slowly or doing it wrong. Why wasn’t he mad now?

Ratchet, R2 realized. Ratchet had said he would give him a medical dispensation. He must have done it while R2 was asleep. Had he really convince Shockswitch to give him more time to complete the design?

He wished he could run back and thank the medic again, but the elevator was at the bottom floor now. Shockswitch was leading the way out toward the street, and R2 had to hurry to keep up.

It was only when they reached the street that R2 realized just how tired he still was. His entire frame felt built from lead. He barely noticed his plating grinding together as he transformed and pulled out into the street behind Shockswitch, and his attention tunneled in on the glow of Shockswitch’s taillights.

At this time of night, there was no one on the roads to mind if he was a bit slow in following Shockswitch across the lanes, and the trip back was routine by now. By the time they pulled up in front of their apartment, R2’s helm felt full of steel wool, and his frame felt like putty, but he hadn’t fallen behind.

“Go fuel and get to recharge, if you’re not going to do anything productive,” Shockswitch said when he let them into the apartment. He didn’t stop even as R2 stopped in the entryway, just made his way further into the apartment without a backward glance.

R2 lingered until he heard the sound of the washracks turning on. He should probably have energon before he went to his room, but his systems weren’t too badly off night now and the thought of taking a detour to the dispenser as he shuffled to his berth, even for the necessary fuel, was exhausting.

Instead, he shuffled further into the apartment. His door was open, the way he’d left it this morning, and he didn’t bother to hit the button to close it behind him. He fumbled his way into his room without turning on the light, and only barely remembered to eject the contents of his subspace onto the desk before collapsing onto the berth. His clumsy hands fumbled out the cables to hook him up to the recharge berth, and the moment he plugged them in, he was gone.

When he finally came online again his HUD was all but empty. The only notification was a bright and cheery green one that said he’d completed a full recharge and defrag cycle.

R2 slowly propped himself upright, staring at the message. He never managed to come out of recharge on his own, not even with an alarm. It was one of the many things Shockswitch liked to complain about in the mornings when they were rushing to leave.

Usually by the time Shockswitch was hauling him out of his berth his systems had managed to get back to 70%, but they’d gotten back later than usual last night. He’d been expecting to hit 50%, if that. It would have taken an extra joor of recharge just to get to 70%, too much time even if Shockswitch let him sleep through the usual morning routine.

Checking his chronometer sent him scrambling out of his berth with a cry. Late! He was late, it was nearly two joors after he and Shockswitch usually _arrived at_ the University.  

R2 rushed out of his room, spark pounding—

Only to draw up short in the main room. Shockswitch was sitting by the counter of their little energon dispensary, a cube in one hand and a datapad in the other.

Shockswitch looked up just as R2 stumbled to a halt. “Stop stomping,” he said, frowning. “What are you doing running about like that?”

 “Um, Shockswitch?” R2 quavered. “Aren’t we late?”

“We are not going to the University today,” Shockswitch said. “I have no lectures, and no work that cannot be accomplished from here. Since you brought your project back with you last night, there is no reason to make the trip.”

 “So we’re staying here?” R2 asked. It was risking irritating Shockswitch, to ask him to repeat himself, but R2 needed to hear it.

“We are working from the apartment,” Shockswitch said. It was in the tone of a reprimand, so R2 nodded eagerly.

R2 nearly staggered with relief. The roads would be clogged with traffic if they tried to leave now, and even the thought of driving in the midst of that was enough to make his plating clamp down to his frame in distress. “Right!” he said quickly, hurrying past Shockswitch to draw a cube from the dispenser. “I’ll just fuel while I work, then.” His tanks were pinging low energy levels at him, thanks to his trip straight to the berth last night, but Shockswitch didn’t seem to remember that he’d ordered R2 to grab a cube last night. He simply nodded R2 along.

Still, R2 didn’t linger. As soon as his cube was full, he took an injector cap for the cube and retreated back to his room before Shockswitch looked up from his datapad again.

His desk was jumbled with the datapads he had dumped on it last night. He winced to see that he’d forgotten to deactivate the one with his project on it before putting it into his subspace yesterday, and now the battery was completely drained. He plugged the device into his desktop terminal and pulled back his faceplate so he could take his fuel while he waited for the device to charge.

The injector made it easier to pour the energon down his rudimentary intake without spilling it all down his front. He couldn’t taste it this way, but the first drops of fuel hit his tanks in a rush. R2 could feel the energy it lent to his systems.

He felt like he’d been upgraded again. His processing speed had jumped, the automatic functions that usually bogged down his RAM chugging along smoothly in the background. Last night, picking through his downloaded database for the relevant schematics had been like hunting for 5 millimeter washers in a vat of oil. Now his processor felt turbocharged, so much faster than it had ever seemed before.

By the time he finished his cube, the datapad had recharged enough to work, and R2 didn’t hesitate to turn on the screen.

His half-finished design greeted him. He’d scrawled Shockswitch’s specifications along the margins of the image. He already had a range of generator designs pulled up from his database, but the part that had stumped him the previous night was changing the designs to fit the size requirements Shockswitch had imposed.

Looking them over now provided no new insights, and R2 huffed air out through his vents as he skimmed through the designs listlessly. They didn’t work. None of them were slim enough to fit the space requirements Shockswitch had provided, and modifying them would put them below the power requirements. He had searched for one for joors yesterday, but nothing he could find was able to be modified in the right way.

A brief review of the potential designs he had tagged gave him no solutions. The design specs simply did not allow for the degree of modification he needed. It was an impossible task, but Shockswitch wasn’t the type to take no for an answer.

R2 shuffled all of the designs to the background of the datapad and opened a new sketch. If he couldn’t modify anything, then he was going to have to start designing one from scratch. As long as he came up with something that worked, Shockswitch couldn’t be too irritated. A partially finished design was better than nothing, even if Shockswitch wouldn’t accept any excuses. R2 bowed his helm over the datapad and got to work.

The sound of his door opening some time later brought R2 out of his position hunched over the datapad. He twisted in his seat, wincing as his components scraped and stuck ever so slightly, complaining his lack of movement for the past… however long it had been. He hadn’t checked his chronometer before he started on the design, so he wasn’t sure.

“I,” Shockswitch said, from his place in the doorway, “am leaving. You are to finish your work, do you understand?”

R2 hesitated halfway through getting out of his seat. “I’m staying here?” he asked.

“Yes. You need to finish that design, and there is nothing for you to do on this meeting. I don’t want you getting lost in traffic again,” Shockswitch said.

R2 winced at the reminder, but settled back into his chair. Shockswitch watched with an approving nod, then turned toward the door again. “I will be back in a few joors. I expect that to be finished by the time I return,” he ordered over his shoulder as he moved out of R2’s room.

R2 waited in silence until he heard the sound of the front door clicking closed, then the snap of the lock. It felt strange to be alone, until he realized that this was the first time Shockswitch had left him alone in the apartment since his frame upgrade. There simply hadn’t been time until now. Usually, they left for the University first thing after they rose from recharge, and only came back in time to collapse into their berths again. When he’d been in his interim frame, Shockswitch had never brought him along to the University, which meant spending much more time alone in his room within the apartment while Shockswitch carried on with his work as a professor.

He had an adult frame now, which meant he was even more able to take care of himself, and Shockswitch was expecting him to work. He stretched out his arms one more time and turned back to his datapad, and ignored the empty feeling in the apartment.

By the time he finished a design he thought would work, however, Shockswitch still wasn’t back, and he’d already corrected all of the mistakes in his design that he could find. Shockswitch would probably find more, but that required Shockswitch to return and review things.

R2 found his thoughts drifting toward the credentials in his HUD, the ones he hadn’t touched since Ratchet pinged them to him last night.

It wouldn’t hurt to learn a little bit more about a medic who had looked after him, would it? It could at least help settle Shockswitch’s mind about just who had looked R2 over. All it took was sending the ping from his systems to his desktop console, and he could begin looking through the network for information on Ratchet.

There was a lot of it, even using the full list of identification that the medic had sent him. Some of it was news articles, quoting something Ratchet had said about one thing or another. R2 skimmed but didn’t read, and occasionally noted down one or two of the ones from news outlets he knew Shockswitch might tolerate.

Not all of them were from the news, though. There were a few dossiers, from some of Iacon’s hospitals. R2 didn’t recognize the names. None of them seemed to be connected to the clinic where R2 had gotten his upgrade, but they all had important-sounding names and official-looking reviews that might mean something to Shockswitch.

Then, with a bit more browsing, he found a profile in the University directory.

It was… impressive. There was a very, very long list of credentials, and an even longer list of awards, many of which R2 had never heard of before but sounded very prestigious. There was information about research, but most of it was from the hospitals, where Ratchet seemed to have single-handedly saved half of Iacon, from the way some of the accomplishments were phrased.

Nearly hidden below that massive list, there was a University-issued comm code.

R2 instinctively hunched toward the screen, nervous even with Shockswitch still away. The comm code was an opportunity. Ratchet deserved a thank you, especially for convincing Shockswitch to give him an extension, but even if Shockswitch might grudgingly accept a presentation of Ratchet’s trustworthiness as a medic, he probably wouldn’t like it if R2 kept talking to him. Shockswitch hated nosiness, and R2 looking up Ratchet’s contact was definitely nosy.  

Then again, Ratchet might not even respond. He was a busy mech, if that list of accomplishments was any indication. He probably had a dozen better things to be doing than responding to a message from R2.

But even if it wouldn’t get Ratchet’s attention, it wouldn’t hurt to give Ratchet his appreciation. R2 noted down the comm code and opened his own University-issued system to draft a message.

Deciding to actually send a message was one thing, but writing it was another. R2 started composing something only to erase it more times than he could count. How was he supposed to write this without sounding silly?

In the end, he kept it short.

_Ratchet,_

_Thank you again for your help yesterday. I’m doing better after some rest, and Shockswitch and I didn’t come in today so I’d have time to finish my work. I’ll try not to let it happen again._

Signing off on the message had R2 hesitating. His university comm code would automatically add his serial number to the message, but he liked the way Ratchet had pronounced the first portion of it yesterday. It felt warmer than the way Shockswitch said his serial number.

In the end, he signed the message as “Artiu,” the way Ratchet had been pronouncing it. Then, with his spark dancing in his throat, he sent it off.

Eventually, he managed to start reviewing some of the other news articles about Ratchet’s accomplishments, but it didn’t stop him from checking his inbox for a response, nor did it stop the spike of disappointment when it was still empty.

Shockswitch returned some joors later. R2 was sure he was going to find something wrong with his work on the generator, but rather than throwing the entire project away, he pronounced the design “acceptable, if the prototype actually works.”

“The prototype?” R2 asked, startled, startled out of his attempts to broach the topic of Ratchet to Shockswitch.  

“Yes, the prototype. You don’t expect we would build this without testing it, would you?” Shockswitch said, handing the datapad back.

R2 settled it on his desk again and didn’t say that he hadn’t realized it would be getting to prototype stage at all.

Shockswitch didn’t appear to notice his hesitation, because he was already turning toward the doorway once again. “Now that you’ve finished that, come with me,” he ordered. “You haven’t cleaned your frame in far too long, and I need to have a proper waxing.”

The trip to the washracks took far longer than R2 had expected, between Shockswitch’s insistence on double-checking that R2 had really gotten his frame thoroughly clean and the exacting process of getting Shockswitch’s plating properly washed. By the time they were finished, even R2’s basic white and gray looked like new, and Shockswitch’s blue and bronze gleamed in the light.

It was far earlier than they usually returned from the University, but despite the uneventful day R2 felt exhausted. He had the time to be amused that a full recharge cycle would leave him more easily exhausted than before, but he was out as soon as he plugged himself into the berth.

When Shockswitch woke him the next morning with a shake and a demand to hurry up, R2 knew that things were back to normal. He scrambled to collect his datapads into his subspace as he dismissed the warnings on his HUD about an interrupted recharge cycle and followed Shockswitch out of the apartment.

Between the trip out to the University and the stack of datapads Shockswitch handed off to him to summarize, and his demand that R2 put together the list of materials they would need to construct his prototype generator, R2 didn’t actually have a chance to check his University comm until Shockswitch left his office to teach his second lecture of the day.

To his surprise, there was a message from Ratchet waiting for him.

R2 nearly fumbled the console’s controls in his rush to open the message.

Ratchet had responded using the shortened serial number as R2 had written it out.

_Artiu_

_I’ve sent you a few resources attached to this message. This is most of what the medic should have told you about frame transfers. If you have any questions, stop by my office._

It was as brief a message as R2 had expected in return, but Ratchet had attached a number of documents and a schedule of times he’d be in his office with the building and number of the office at the top.

R2 downloaded the entire message to a datapad and deleted it from the console. If Shockswitch walked in and saw him looking at this… His mentor was not one to have patience with anyone distracted from their work, especially something that Shockswitch had already told him to set aside. Still, if Ratchet thought it was important for him to know, he wanted to know it.

 _‘It’s just to help Shockswitch look after me,_ ’ he tried to reason, but he still found himself switching to the office chair farthest from the door, and glancing up every other line to check that Shockswitch wasn’t coming back from his lesson.

To his surprise, the files Ratchet attached for him were mostly simple lists. There were a few things on there—driving, data downloads—that were suggested to avoid, but most of it simply said to take it easy and get in contact with a medic if any severe warnings emerged or other alerts continued to pop up.

R2 tapped his fingers nervously against the side of the datapad. On the one hand, Shockswitch had been having him do a lot of things he shouldn’t have, according to Ratchet’s information. But he’d always looked after him, and none of the warnings the information mentioned had popped up until yesterday night. Shockswitch was always checking in on him and making sure everything was going the way it was supposed to. Surely he knew what he was doing.  

Shockswitch’s class would be ending any moment now. R2 turned off the datapad and set it aside, but as he turned back to the stack of datapads Shockswitch had handed off to him, the worry lingered in his processer.

He didn’t have much time to think about things after then. Shockswitch seemed determined to make up for the lost day by pressing forward on the generator project with a will. The late nights and early mornings returned, and though he never had another attack, his HUD slowly became populated by yellow warnings about minor system stresses, and even when his work carried him out of Shockswitch’s attention, it was never the right time to try and find Ratchet’s office, because the break wasn’t long enough or because the schedule said he wouldn’t be there.  So the first time R2 saw Ratchet again, it was entirely by accident.

R2 nearly didn’t notice him. He was rushing after Shockswitch, doing his best to keep his eyes on his mentor through the crowds as they worked their way through the lobby. Shockswitch was already irritated and rushing, after a crash on the freeway had reduced the already-crowded roads to a near-standstill.

The press of other vehicle modes around him, even if they weren’t traveling at any speed, had been an unpleasant start, and R2 was still trying to keep his knees from wobbling while he followed Shockswitch toward his mentor’s office.

In the midst of stepping toward a doorway, Shockswitch took a sudden sidestep, one that R2 followed automatically, and only a glimpse of medic-shade red and white had him looking up.

He hadn’t been in a good position that night to remember many details, but he could remember a dark chevron and a weathered face, and blue optics that were now staring at him in dawning recognition.

“Oh, it’s you,” Ratchet said. “How’re you doing? Any problems?”

Caught off-guard, R2 could only manage a nod, but Shockswitch stepped forward before he could activate his vocalizer. “Yes, he’s fine,” he said. “And we’re all busy mechs here, so if you will excuse us…?”

R2 let out a little beep of surprise as Shockswitch grabbed his arm and began to tug him along through the doorway. He managed to turn enough to give Ratchet a wave, and found the mech frowning after them.

A moment later, R2 got a ping. The only thing in it was a comm code—a _personal_ comm code.

When R2’s widened optics jerked back up to meet Ratchet’s, the medic was still frowning, but he nodded. R2 wanted to… to something, say thank you, or ask why, or anything, but Shockswitch was pulling him along insistently, and the door was closing.

He didn’t _need_ to linger, R2 realized. He had the code. He could tell Ratchet thank you in a comm, if he wanted.

The giddiness didn’t last very long. Shockswitch was still leading him along by the arm, and R2 had to move quickly to keep up. He couldn’t see his mentor’s faceplates, but the stiff set of his frame did not bode well for R2.

Sure enough, Shockswitch turned toward R2 the moment they arrived in his office. “I thought we'd agreed you weren't going to interact with that medic anymore,” Shockswitch said crossing his arms over his chassis.

“I haven’t seen him at all,” R2 said quickly, hunching his shoulders. He had _contacted_ Ratchet, but that was the last answer he wanted to give Shockswitch when he was already angry. He wondered what would have happened if he’d given Shockswitch the list of articles about Ratchet’s accomplishments as a medic, but from the look on his mentor’s face now he didn’t think it would have gone well. “He was probably just being friendly.”

"Just nothing," Shockswitch interrupted. "He's a hack of a doctor and I don't want him feeding you misinformation about your health. You stay away from him, you hear me?" 

"Yes, Shockswitch," R2 said, swallowing back his protests. Ratchet had only been trying to help him, but Shockswitch was in one of his moods, and that meant there would be no convincing him otherwise. R2 thought guiltily of the comm code he had now. It didn’t mean he was going to let Ratchet tell him the wrong thing about his health, he reasoned. It was just that he wanted to apologize for their rush to leave earlier, especially since Ratchet was only being polite.

Shockswitch clearly was not finished, but they were already late, and Shockswitch had his class. So instead of any further reprimands Shockswitch just gave him a stern look. “I’m leaving,” he said. “I expect you to work on the prototype while I’m gone. And wire it properly! The way we talked about, not that nonstandard mess you were trying before.”

Again, R2 found himself holding back his objections. The last time they’d worked on the prototype, any progress had been halted by an argument about the wiring. Shockswitch insisted that it be done in the standard fashion, and would not listen whenever R2 tried to tell him that the standard configuration would not work when he’d had to make the entire generator non-standard to fit Shockswitch’s specifications.

Instead, he just nodded silently as Shockswitch left. He could wire things the way Shockswitch wanted him to, then when the generator didn’t work, maybe Shockswitch would see what he meant.

With that tentative plan in mind, he gathered his tools and datapads and made his way down to Shockswitch’s workshop. The room was well-equipped, with most all of the tools needed for creating and testing their prototype designs. Shockswitch and R2 were the only ones who had access to it, and although there was a part or two he might have to go over to the main workroom for, he would be spending most of his time alone.

He was itching to use the comm code, but he forced himself to wait until he was in the lab and had finished setting out his tools to actually call it. As the line waited to connect, he started adjusting his line of pliers.

Then it connected, and he nearly sent the entire tray crashing to the floor when he jerked.

 _"What?"_ Someone snapped on the other end of the line. 

R2 froze. "Um. Is this Ratchet?" he asked. 

There was a long pause. _"Artiu?"_  

R2's worried trepidation dissolved into relief as Ratchet pronounced the shortened version of his serial number. "Yeah, it's me," he said. "Um, is this a bad time?" 

This time there was no pause, and the sharpness was gone from Ratchet's voice. _"Nah, kid,"_ he said. _"You just caught me in the middle of grading, and it's slagging irritating work."_

"Oh," R2 said. Shockswitch was never pleased to be interrupted in the middle of anything, and another apology queued in his vocalizer.

Before he could make his excuses and end the conversation, however, Ratchet was speaking again. _"Wasn't sure you'd actually use the code_ ," he said. _"So, how are you doing, since your mentor there didn't want to let you answer?"_  

"Shockswitch just wanted to get to work," R2 answered diplomatically. "There's a lot we need to get done, and he doesn't want me getting distracted. It's why I haven't had the time to get up to your office, yet. I've been working on that project." 

 _"That design you were working on in the middle of the night?"_ Ratchet snorted. _"If you're so busy, are you sure you should be calling me?"_  

"I can work and talk," R2 hurried to reassure him. Which he should be doing, he realized guiltily. He had completely ignored the wiring under his fingertips since he'd started the call. Hurriedly, he ducked his helm again and started tracing out the connectors.

 _"And I can talk and grade,"_ Ratchet said. _"Really, kid. Without anyone interrupting, have you been getting any more errors?"_

R2 pulled out and stripped the ends of a new wire while he considered Ratchet’s question. It wasn’t really telling Ratchet any medical information if he was just saying that he was fine, right? "I haven't been getting any errors. I slept in that day and we didn't come in to work on anything and I haven't had any problems since."

 _"That's good,"_ Ratchet said. He sounded genuinely pleased to hear it, which eased some of R2's worry. _"Acute stress can sometimes trigger problems just as much as extended periods. In either case, rest will help. Glad you’re doing better."_

"We’re busy, but Shockswitch does his best to look out for me," R2 said, absentmindedly slotting the wire into place. "He's worried that I'll scare myself into making it happen again, I guess." 

Ratchet scoffed. _"Believe me, no one thinks themselves into frame rejection."_

"That's what it looked like it said in those pamphlets you sent to me," R2 agreed. The wiring was coming together under his fingers now, but the end of Shockswitch’s lecture period was also drawing closer. “Um. I wanted to say sorry for Shockswitch’s rushing this morning. With the traffic, we were kind of late, and Shockswitch had to go teach.”

 _“No need to apologize for him,”_ Ratchet said. _“But I get it. If he’s lecturing, what are you doing?”_

“Working on a prototype. It’s a generator, and I need to make sure the wiring to the battery is working,” R2 said. “I… probably shouldn’t be on the comms while I’m doing it,” he admitted reluctantly.

 _“And those classes are finishing up soon?”_ Ratchet asked, but he continued on before R2 could think of a way to respond to that. _“I won’t keep distracting you, then,”_ he said easily. _“But if you have anything else you want to know… And I mean it, Artiu, any questions at all… My comm’s open. My office, too. Can’t guarantee I’ll answer but I’ll get back to you within the day.”_

It took everything he had not to ask if Ratchet was sure, but he didn’t want to risk him changing his mind. “Okay!” he said quickly. “I will. Thank you again.”

 _“Sure thing, kid,”_ Ratchet said easily. _“We’ll talk again soon.”_


	4. Ratchet: The open door policy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ratchet finally gets a visitor he's been hoping for, and adds some concerns to his growing list while he's at it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just about a month again! Life has kind of gotten in the way between the past few updates. I'm running out of pre-written material at this point, but I'll do my best to keep the wait between this chapter and the next down to the usual timespan. 
> 
> Specific things for this chapter: non-critical injuries. Everything else is about par for course for this fic.

“I don’t know why you bothered to come all the way here,” Ratchet grumbled.

Ironhide, in the middle of sitting down in Ratchet’s almost-too-small guest chair, looked up. “Aww, Ratch, you saying you aren’t glad to see me?” he chuckled.

“I’m saying that you could have waited until I wasn’t working,” Ratchet retorted. “Why are you here, anyway? Don’t you have work to do?” He turned away to pick up a stack of datapads, which Ironhide promptly took as an invitation to prop up his pedes on Ratchet’s desk.

Ratchet shoved them off and smothered an amused snort when Ironhide yelped and nearly tipped over backwards. As soon as Ironhide had stabilized himself, he glared at Ratchet, who grinned back unrepentantly.

“You still haven’t answered my question,” Ratchet pointed out as Ironhide tried to cover his blunder with a scowl. “You can’t be here just to break my furniture.”

“Senator Decimus wanted ta ‘just stop by’ the University for a tour after his meetings ended today,” Ironhide grumbled. “By th’ time I was finally replaced I was here anyway, so I figured I’d drop by.”

“So Decimus is as accommodating of his staff as always,” Ratchet said. He was familiar with Ironhide’s gripes with this particular Senator by now.

Ironhide’s answer was a single tired grunt.

“Well,” Ratchet said, picking up the next of his datapads, “I suppose I can let you hang around, as long as you aren’t an annoyance.”

“I’ll be good,” Ironhide said, breaking into a grin even as he dimmed his optics and slumped in the chair.

“You’d better,” Ratchet said. “I’m not changing my schedule just for you, you lug.”

A shuffling sound from the doorway caught Ratchet’s attention. He looked up, ready with a lecture about how it wasn’t his office hours—

But it wasn’t any of his students. Ratchet caught a glimpse of dull white and gray before he recognized Artiu.

“Oh, um, I guess you’re busy!” Artiu said, taking a step back from the door. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt. I’ll leave, I’m sorry...”

Ironhide flinched and his optics lit up again at the unfamiliar voice, and Artiu ducked back even further under the red mech’s stare.

“Nah, kid, don’t mind Ironhide,” Ratchet said, pushing back his chair. “He’s just stopping by. Did you need something?”

“No,” Artiu answered quickly, backing up another step. “No, I… I was just going to say hi, but I really should be going. Sorry to bother you.” He gave Ratchet a jerky nod and fled.

He vanished into the hall before Ratchet could even make it out of his chair. “Kid—“ Ratchet called, but by the time he reached his doorway, Artiu was nowhere in sight. “Dammit,” Ratchet huffed.  

 The chair creaked under Ironhide’s weight as he shifted. Ratchet didn’t even have to turn to know that Ironhide was giving him a look. “What was that about?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Ratchet said, sitting back down.

“Right,” Ironhide drawled, and didn’t stop staring. Ratchet tried to ignore it, but even when he turned his attention back to his datapads, he could feel the weight of Ironhide’s stare.

“Are you going to just sit there?” he snapped, looking up from his work.

Ironhide’s grin was positively smug. “I dunno what you’re talking about,” he said. “I’m just being good, like I told you.”

“That’s a load of slag and you know it,” Ratchet said, but he finally gave in to Ironhide’s unspoken request with a huff of air from his vents. “Fine, if you want to know that badly.”

“I ran into that kid one time late in the off-shift. He wasn’t doing so well, so I kept an optic on him until his mentor showed up and dragged him off to rest.”

Ironhide arched an optic ridge. “Not like you to play medic for your students,” he said. “Shove them in the right direction, sure, but not look after them yourself.”

“He’s not my student,” Ratchet said, “he’s in the engineering department, or at least his mentor is.”

“Right,” Ironhide said. “Which means you’d shove him at a clinic and be done with it. Really, Ratchet, what’s the story here?”

 There were excuses that came to mind, but nothing that would work on anyone who knew him, especially not an old friend like Ironhide.

“… I don’t like his mentor,” Ratchet grumbled. “Not because of a professional rivalry,” he added before Ironhide could interject. “I’ve never even met him before this incident. But every time I see him he’s dragging Artiu around like he wants him on a leash.”

“What makes ya say that?” Ironhide asked. Ratchet was gratified to see when he glanced up that the amusement had disappeared, to be replaced by a frown.

“The way he hauled the kid off without even asking him if he was all right, for one,” Ratchet grumbled. “He tried to argue with me about the effects of frame transfers, and then he just ordered the kid to leave with him.”

Ironhide’s frown only deepened. “Was the kid doing that badly?” he asked.

“Spark fluctuations,” Ratchet answered. “Which I believe was caused by overwork and lack of recharge in the wake of a frame transfer.”

“And you think his mentor has somethin’ to do with it?”

“I’m reasonably certain his mentor is also his guardian, or that they at least live in close proximity. He was making noises about dragging Artiu home when he came after him,” Ratchet said.

Ironhide’s engine roared, then settled down into a low, threatening rumble. “So you’re saying that kid’s just been upgraded, and his guardian’s the one pushing him to a spark failure?”

“I’m saying I don’t know what’s going on, Ironhide, don’t jump to conclusions!” Ratchet said, though he couldn’t quite manage the forceful snap to his vocalizer that he wanted. The conclusion Ironhide had reached was far too close to what he’d thought was the worst-case scenario for Artiu.

Ratchet sighed and rubbed a hand across his face. “Right now, I know the kid’s probably still recovering from a serious medical procedure, and he doesn’t seem to have the support system he needs,” Ratchet said.

“So you’re stepping up?” Ironhide asked, finally settling back. He didn’t look about ready to punch something any more, and though Ratchet couldn’t say exactly what had caused the change, he wasn’t about to protest it.

“No one had told the kid anything about what to expect, of course I stepped in,” Ratchet said. “I told him to stop by my office sometime, but he’s mostly been reaching out to me over comms. He’s been busy with some project, apparently.”

 “And when he finally got a chance to stop by, my big aft was in here and he lost his nerve?” Ironhide filled in, then huffed air from his vents. “Well that’s some fragging marvelous timing.”

“Downright miracle of Primus,” Ratchet drawled, and Ironhide leaned forward to swipe at him.

“Slagging atheist,” Ironhide grumped. “Fine, I know where I’m not wanted.”

Ratchet scoffed at Ironhide’s exaggerated pout. “I’m not kicking you out, you stodgy old Primalist,” he said. “You’ll just sit around in traffic the moment you hit the road.”

“Probably,” Ironhide agreed, but he was getting up anyway. “It’s about time I headed back, though. Got training to run in a few joors and if I’m late things’ll go to the pit.”

“Oh, all right,” Ratchet said, waving Ironhide on. “I’m not about to stop you. Are we still on for later?”

“At HQ, you know it,” Ironhide said. “I’ll let your kid know that you’re free if I see him.”

“He’s not _my_ kid,” Ratchet protested, but Ironhide was already gone, letting the door slide shut behind him and leaving Ratchet unable to get the last word.

Well, Ironhide might see Artiu or he might not. The kid might really have left, though Ratchet thought that he wouldn’t have. Still didn’t mean he hadn’t hidden himself away somewhere that Ironhide wouldn’t spot him on his way out, though.

In the end, Ratchet sent a non-priority ping to the comm code Artiu had called him from. He didn’t attach much data, just a brief invitation to stop by his office.

It still wasn’t a guarantee that Artiu would actually come by. Even if the kid wasn’t scared of interrupting Ratchet again, it was likely that he’d be called away to do some other work and wouldn’t be able to return.

The invitation was there. Ratchet could only hope the kid would take it. In the meantime, he had a test to write, and evaluations to write for his staff at the hospital.

He was most of the way through the exam (through sheer stubborn determination, and some harshness—there was no time for getting things wrong as a medic, and his students had to learn that before they’d gotten too far along, he told himself) and was beginning to wonder if he’d be sitting on his own all night when he was pinged.

“It’s open, c’mon in!” Ratchet called.

Ratchet looked up from his datapad to see Artiu lingered in the doorway. Even without a mobile faceplate, Artiu’s entire frame radiated hesitance and uncertainty. His shoulders and helm hunched down, his hands were tucked behind him. His paint was still in the shoddy basic grays and whites that Ratchet recognized as a standard medical basecoat. It looked like it had been touched up here and there, with scuffs and scrapes covered over, but it seemed like that was the only thing anyone had done to it since Artiu’s frame transfer. The only part of his frame that stood out was the slate-gray fins framing his faceplate.

Medical basecoats rarely lasted longer than it took an injured mech to arrange a repainting. According to Artiu he’d been busy on projects, but Artiu remembered the striking blue and bronze of Artiu’s mentor.

Another mark against Shockswitch, Ratchet thought grimly.

Artiu looked ready to bolt. Ratchet set that train of thought aside and beckoned the kid inside. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said, as Artiu finally inched his way inside.

“It’s okay!” Artiu said immediately. “I didn’t exactly call ahead…” he was looking around Ratchet’s office with obvious fascination.

There wasn’t much to it. His desk was the worst of it, covered with stacks of datapads for grading and return, with his University-provided console taking up one side. The shelves along the walls were filled with memory cores for lessons and data downloads that Ratchet preferred not to keep in his console, and the occasional holoprojector or hardlight model generator for demonstrations during lectures.

There wasn’t much by the way of personal effects, but the place seemed to be enough to capture Artiu’s attention.

“Well come sit down,” Ratchet said, “Ironhide’s big bumper didn’t break the chair.”

Artiu startled as his attention was redirected toward the chair. “Oh… right, sorry!” he said. “I didn’t mean to be nosy.”

“It’s not all that interesting,” Ratchet said, scanning the shelves. “I suppose you’re welcome to take a look, but I can’t guarantee you’ll find anything worth the search…”

A pained hiss from Artiu caught his attention, and he looked over to see Artiu tucking his hands into his lap.

“Something wrong with your hands?”

Artiu flinched and drew his hands back, holding them to his chassis. “I—“

Ratchet could see scorch marks and bubbled paint, and it was all he could do not to start lecturing the kid about taking care of himself.

“Let me see them,” Ratchet said, holding out his own hand expectantly. “Was this why you stopped by earlier?”

 Artiu nodded silently, and shifted forward in the chair. Now that he wasn’t hiding them, Ratchet could see the stiff way Artiu was holding them, and the burn marks that covered them.

“That looks like it hurts,” Ratchet observed.

Artiu was watching him with round optics. “A little,” he admitted.

“Probably more than a little,” Ratchet grumbled, pushing back in his seat to get at the drawers of his desk. “I have some pain blockers around here somewhere, and then we can see about taking care of that damage.” He hunted through the desk drawer, with its collection of microtools and energon additives. “If this happens again, kid, I want you to barge in and interrupt, you hear me?”

“What?”

“I mean it. If it’s something serious, like your spark giving you trouble again, then you call the hospital for help, but I won’t mind if you come into my office for things like this. Believe me, Ironhide wouldn’t mind being kicked out for this.”

Ratchet finally found the right chip, and looked up to find Artiu staring down at his damaged hands. Too much to convince the kid of at once, Ratchet guessed, and turned his attention back to Artiu’s hands.

“You’re holding them pretty stiffly,” Ratchet observed instead. “Is it difficult to move your fingers?”

“It just hurts when I do,” Artiu said, still hunched over his hands.

“No grinding or anything?” Ratchet asked. He reached out, then paused. “Mind if I look your hands over?”

That got Artiu to look up. “Okay,” he said, holding out his hands toward Ratchet. “I don’t think they grind.”

“Well, we can check that out once the pain blocker is working,” Ratchet said. “Here, give me your arm, and let’s plug this in.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Artiu offered the port in his arm. Ratchet plugged in the blocker and waited for the program to run.

“So what happened?” he asked. “Those are some nasty burns.”

For a moment, Ratchet thought the kid might honestly try to tell him it was nothing, and he was already gearing up for another snapped remark when Artiu looked down at his hands.

“Uh, yeah,” he said, his tone edging into sheepish. “I, um, I got shocked.”

“I’ll say,” Ratchet said with a huff. “It looks like you grabbed a live wire and held on.”

“Not a wire. Just an electrified power cell,” Artiu admitted.

“How’d you manage that?”

Artiu was practically squirming under Ratchet’s optics. “I panicked,” he mumbled.

It wasn’t really an explanation. _You’re not the kid’s guardian,_ he reminded himself sharply. _And pushing for an answer is more likely to make him try and hide it._ Instead, he sighed and leaned forward across the desk.

“How’s the pain blocker working?” Ratchet asked. He saw Artiu’s hands twitch, then the kid’s optics went wide with surprise.

“It’s stopped hurting,” he said.

“Don’t move things too much, there’s still damage,” Ratchet warned, and Artiu kept his hands obligingly still.  “Right, then. Let me see.”

Ratchet took up Artiu’s hands at the wrist and turned them so he could see the palms. He saw Artiu’s shoulders go tense as he reached out, but another look of surprise developed when Ratchet actually touched him. Because it didn’t hurt? Ratchet cast the thought aside in favor of turning Artiu’s hand over with his light grip, and Artiu followed his touch easily.

The palms and pads of his fingers were far worse than the glimpses Ratchet had caught earlier, the paint warped enough to have melted and peeled off, and char marks showing in scatters along the edges of the plates.

“Can you spread out your fingers for me?” Ratchet asked. Artiu did so immediately, and made a little sound as his paint chipped. Ratchet patted his arm in sympathy.

“Did you feel any pressure, or grinding, when you did that?” he asked. With the pain gone, the movements had been slow, but smooth, no signs of damaged components or torn wiring.

“No,” Artiu confirmed. He let his hands relax again, cautious of the still-damaged paint.

“Good,” Ratchet said. He released Artiu’s wrists to pull a bottle of nanite sealant from his desk. “It doesn’t seem like there’s damage to the servomechanisms, but it will take some time for the surface to heal. I want to apply some of this,” he said, holding up the bottle for Artiu to see. “It’s a sealant with additional nanite components. The nanites will promote a fast repair. In the meantime, I can give you that pain blocker. Palms up,” he told Artiu, who stared at him in surprise.

“You don’t have to do that, you’re already…”

“I’m already helping you out, so I might as well finish the job,” Ratchet retorted. “And with your hands damaged, you’re certainly not going to be doing it yourself.”

Artiu looked down at his hands, and the chips of paint all but peeling off of them. “I guess so,” he agreed, his shoulders hunching.

“You can watch while I apply it, and I’ll give you the bottle so you can do it yourself next time,” Ratchet said, and that seemed to cheer Artiu up. He watched avidly as Ratchet coated a layer of the sealant across Artiu’s palms. It didn’t take long for it to harden into a shiny enameled layer.

“There we go,” Ratchet said with a nod of satisfaction. “Try not to do too much with your hands for a while,” Ratchet advised. “The sealant should stick until the nanites have done their jobs, but too much wear will rub everything off and set back the repair.” Artiu fidgeted in his seat, and Ratchet watched him consciously stop from feeling over the enamel coating. “If that happens you can reapply the sealant,” he added, handing off the bottle.

Artiu tucked it carefully away. “Thank you,” he said, optics bright.

Ratchet reset his vocalizer and shuffled through the datapads on his desk. “You’re welcome,” he said gruffly. “Now, remember what I said about the sealant, and about you getting injured. If something like this happens again—which it shouldn’t—“ he waggled a finger at Artiu, who ducked his helm contritely, “you come to me and get it fixed, do you understand?”

Artiu ducked his helm contritely, but nodded. “Okay, Ratchet, I will,” he said.

“That’d better be a promise,” Ratchet told him.

“I promise,” Artiu said. The kid’s helm was lowered, but he was staring at the coating on his palms, not curled in on himself the way he had been when he’d walked into Ratchet’s office. That was a success as Ratchet tallied it.

Even better was that Artiu didn’t seem to be worried about hurrying away to his next task. He wasn’t looking toward the door or fidgeting with a datapad. Instead, he’d settled down into Ratchet’s guest chair, and he was sneaking peeks at the shelves again.

“Have you ever studied frame mechanics, Artiu?” 

If the kid started fidgeting, Ratchet wasn’t about to keep him, but he suspected that Artiu needed some time away from his mentor and his projects. He certainly needed some time for the nanites to start working before he started using his hands again.

“No, I haven’t,” Artiu said, looking back toward Ratchet. “That’s not what you do, is it?”

“Not entirely, but it’s a part of it,” Ratchet agreed. “Frame mechanics is the literal nuts and bolts of how we work. I have to deal with the complications that arise when sparks and energon and processors get involved, but most medical students get started with the frame mechanics side of things.”

“Is that what you’re teaching now?” Artiu asked, leaning forward.

“Among other things,” Ratchet confirmed. “Right now I’m getting ready to test them on limitations related to transformation and alt-modes.”

“How does that work?”

“Well, obviously transformation relies on our T-cogs, but there’s a lot more to it than that. You can’t stick a cog in just any old robot and expect it to turn into a vehicle.”

 “Because its frame isn’t designed to transform,” Artiu said, then fell silent. Ratchet just nodded despite the interruption.

“Exactly,” he said. “Hold on, I have a diagram around here somewhere… ah, there we go. So in addition to having a functioning T-cog, we need a few other things to transform…”

He’d meant for it to be a quick discussion, something to pass the time, but Artiu was completely enthralled. His first few attempts at asking questions were stilted and hesitant, but once he realized that Ratchet wasn’t about to get angry at him for asking, he’d started asking more and more questions.

He didn’t have the medical knowledge or training that Ratchet’s students did, but he more than made up for it with curiosity and enthusiasm. Before he knew it, they’d spent more than a joor going through the basics of frame mechanics.

It was the most he’d enjoyed a lesson in his past few semesters of teaching. Maybe it was because it was one-on-one, Ratchet mused, but a good portion of it was Artiu, who seemed to be starving for all the information he could drink in. Once he’d started, he couldn’t seem to stop asking questions, and it might have annoyed Ratchet in a class, but here he only had to explain what Artiu wanted to know. And they were _good_ questions, besides.

“What I wouldn’t give for more students like you,” Ratchet said when the conversation finally wound down.

Artiu looked like Ratchet had just given him a gift. “Really?”

“You sure you don’t want to be a medic, kid?” Ratchet chuckled. “I could use more students like you in my classes.”

Artiu ducked his helm. “I like engineering,” he mumbled. “And I’m working with Shockswitch.”

Just the mention of Artiu’s mentor was enough to bring down the mood. Ratchet had to keep from grimacing. Just when things had been going so well, too.

It was like watching all the life get siphoned out of Artiu. His shoulder slumped, his optics dimmed, his helm ducked. Every plate tucked in low and tight, so abruptly that he appeared to suddenly go down half a size class.

He still looked young, but this time, he looked small and frightened, and terribly, terribly alone.

The sight strengthened Ratchet’s resolve. He only barely avoided reaching out to lay his hand on the kid’s arm.

“It couldn’t hurt to know more about frame engineering,” Ratchet said. “Stop by again, and we can pick up where you left off.”

That was enough to bring Artiu’s mood back up. “Yeah,” he agreed, shuffling his way toward the door. “Um, but you have work to finish before you leave, right? I’ll stop bothering you so you can do that. Thank you for the help. I’ll bring back the sealant, I promise.”

“Remember what I said about injuries!” Ratchet called after him. He couldn’t tell if the kid had heard it or not.

“Frag.” Ratchet grimaced down at his work. The suspicions he’d mentioned to Ironhide earlier were only growing. Even thinking about Shockswitch was enough to frighten Artiu. And those injuries…

Ratchet couldn’t shake the feeling that there was a story about Artiu’s mentor wrapped up in those burns. He couldn’t ask, not when Artiu shut down at the mention of his mentor, but Artiu clearly did not feel comfortable going to Shockswitch about his injuries. That was telling.

By the time he was finally on his way to meet Ironhide after his hospital shift, the irritation had faded to general annoyance, dulled by exhaustion after a long day of work. At least the drive to Ironhide’s barracks was easy at this late hour. There was no traffic to speak of, which meant that he arrived at the Headquarters less than a joor after he left the hospital.

The “headquarters,” as Ironhide called it, was the compound where the Senate guardsmechs lived. It had some official title, but Ratchet doubted anyone called the compound that. Ironhide and his fellow guards all called it HQ, and the Senators had probably forgotten that it existed.

An impressive feat, considering that the building was set directly under the Senate. It was a functional but dreary space, and Ratchet knew that only the large average frame class of the guards had convinced the Senate’s budgeting committee to account for comfortable ceiling heights (and that only after they’d been reminded that the average guard was more than a head taller than the average senator). That Ratchet knew because Ironhide had complained to him through the entire process eight vorn ago.

Ironhide was waiting at the entrance to escort him, as usual. He took one look at Ratchet’s scowl and whistled. “What crawled up your tailpipe?”

“Shut it,” Ratchet grumbled. Ironhide chuckled but complied, much to Ratchet’s relief, and their walk to Ironhide’s quarters continued in blissful silence. Ironhide occasionally called out a greeting to a mech passing by. Ratchet spared a nod for a few familiar faces, but didn’t pause, and Ironhide, catching on to Ratchet’s ill temper, didn’t linger either.

When they reached Ironhide’s quarters, Ratchet flopped down on Ironhide’s berth with a groan.

Ironhide detoured toward the cabinet, and emerged moments later with a stack of cubes. “Here we go,” he said, handing one off to Ratchet before taking a seat. He spilled the rest of the cubes onto the berth between them.

“Looks like I made the right choice, getting the good stuff,” Ironhide observed as Ratchet cracked open his cube and took a long drink.

“Long day,” Ratchet answered, sighing in satisfaction as he lowered his cube. Ironhide really had gone for the gold this time around. The high grade was sharp enough to be just the right side of biting,

“What is this, Kalis blend?” Ratchet asked.

“Luna One, actually,” Ironhide said, taking a sip of his own. “Bribed some off of Hardhead. He likes his engex to be an assault on the chemoreceptors.”

Ratchet hummed. “His loss.”

“Right,” Ironhide rumbled. “So. Fragged shift?”

“Huh? Oh. No, no more than usual,” Ratchet said. He was back to taking small sips of his cube to make the drink last.

“So what’s got your gears grinding?” Ironhide turned so he was facing Ratchet. “You look like Decimus decided to make a personal visit to your office.”

“Frag no, he didn’t,” Ratchet shuddered. “You’re too slagging perceptive, you know that?”

“Part of the job,” Ironhide chuckled. “So, you gonna spill, or should I start complainin’ about the trainees?”

“Only if I get to complain about my classes.” Ratchet said, turning his cube in his hands. “Some of it’s good news, though. I managed to talk to the kid after you left.”

Ironhide’s optics lit up with realization. “Oh, your little doorway lurker. What’s he called again? Artiu?”

“That’s it.”

“Y’know, that sounds more like a serial number than a designation,” Ironhide observed. “You academic types don’t usually go for that. You sure it’s his designation?”

Ratchet frowned. “It’s the one he told me.”

Ironhide just shrugged. “Maybe it’s what he likes, then,” he said, waving things off. “Anyway, he came to see you?”

“He did,” Ratchet confirmed. “With his hands covered in burns, because, according to him, he’d panicked and grabbed an electrified power cell.”

“You don’t think that’s the whole story,” Ironhide guessed, watching Ratchet’s faceplates. “So. His mentor?”

“He didn’t say so, but I’m thinking it’s a possibility,” Ratchet growled. “He said it was an accident. But the way he reacted when his mentor came up in conversation—he looked like he was about to walk into spark isolation. It drained all the life out of him.”

Ironhide huffed a breath of air out of his vents, bracing his elbows on his knees. “That’s pretty serious, there.” He agreed grimly. “Anything you can do?”

Ratchet took a swig of his energon, then hunched forward over his knees. “I don’t know,” he sighed. “The kid likes me, I can tell that much, I don’t want to pit my word against his guardian’s, since he hardly knows me anyway. I think the best I can do for now is offer him some space and wait for him to open up to me.”

Ironhide looked at him, a brow ridge arched. “You sure about that? You’re not usually one for patience.”

“I can wait!” Ratchet protested. “It’s not about what I want, anyway, it’s what’s best for the kid.”

“And I know you can’t stand by and see anyone get hurt, either,” Ironhide pointed out. Then he grinned. “Least you ain’t trying to say the kid isn’t your problem. You’re a slagging terrible liar.”

Ratchet rolled his optics. “I’m not about to kidnap him, Ironhide. I’m not looking to make him my charge, either.”

Ironhide sighed. “No, guess not,” he agreed. “Sure would solve a lot of problems, though.”

Ratchet choked on a laugh. “You’re terrible,” he said, chuckling down into his energon cube. “Now let’s stop talking about this. I want to drink myself to a _good_ mood, not rant about this again.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Ironhide agreed, tossing back a large swallow of his own cube. Then his optics lit up. “Well, if you’re looking for a distraction, I know a few tricks,” he rumbled.

Ratchet caught on when Ironhide’s hand slid down his backplates, warm and heavy. “You’re an overclocked hothead,” he chuckled, but he helped Ironhide pull him along until they were lying chassis to chassis along the berth.

“And you’re the glitch who lets me get away with it.” Ironhide retorted, already sliding his hands along Ratchet’s plating. “Now, one distraction coming up.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you see any typos I've missed, please feel free to tell me!


	5. Artiu: Take it as it comes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life goes on at Iacon University, but thanks to his workload, Artiu is in danger of missing all of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I KNOW IT'S LATE BUT I CAN EXPLAIN. 
> 
> The explanation is, life happened while I had this chapter written but not edited, so I've only now had a chance to finish reviewing it. It was going to be longer, but some sections got removed and may eventually be posted as a side-story. 
> 
> I make no promises about the next chapter, but it has been written.
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: Flashback to how Artiu got those injuries in the last chapter.

“I expect this to be done when I get back,” Shockswitch said from his place by the door. “Our normal routine may be disrupted, but that doesn’t mean you should be slacking off in the meantime.”

“Yes sir,” Artiu said, keeping his optics trained down on his datapad. Apparently it was enough to satisfy his mentor, because he left the room without another word.

Once the door clicked closed behind Shockswitch, Artiu slumped, dropping his datapad to press his hands against his faceplate.

He wasn’t going to finish this assignment in time. It didn’t matter how possible Shockswitch thought it was, because Artiu was stuck, and he didn’t know how to fix it.

It wasn’t that this project was any different from Shockswitch’s usual impossible tasks. The premise was simple, really. Study a range of space shuttle designs, then design a small, short-range transport with increased shielding. Only Artiu wasn’t sure that he could do it without breaking the laws of physics along the way.

He rubbed at his optics. Staring down at the datapad and waiting for inspiration wasn’t helping, but he had to finish this by the time Shockswitch returned from the symposium, and that was only if he was going to catch up with his backlog.

At this rate, he was never going to get to visit the symposium.

Artiu let his hands slide down his face and stared gloomily at his datapad. The Iacon University Planetary Symposium on Reasearch and Technology only happened once every seven vorns. Researchers, developers, and engineers from every city-state on Cybertron came to show off the latest developments in technology, collaborate with their peers, and draft standards for their entire community.

Artiu had been looking forward to going from the moment he first saw the posters, but Shockswitch had been quick to correct him for that enthusiasm.

They’d been sitting in Shockswitch’s laboratory, Shockswitch working at his console as Artiu worked on a circuit board.

“The Symposium is only for mecha who are well-established in their field,” Shockswitch had told him. He’d just finished going on about the nested-coil generators he’d be presenting for review, and the panels that he’d be sitting on. “Students that are brought along are usually well on their way to establishing their own work within their discipline, and at the least have contributed significantly to the work that their mentors are presenting.”

“Could I at least go to see your talks?” Artiu had asked. He glanced up from his work, but Shockswitch _tsked_ at him.

“Don’t get solder everywhere,” he said. “I won’t have you needing to redo that.”

Artiu dropped his attention back down to his work, and waited anxiously as the silence stretched on.

“I’ll consider it if you can complete your projects before the symposium starts,” Shockswitch had told him eventually. “You can prove to me that you won’t be distracted by it, and you have the proper worth ethic for it.”

It was now the first day of the symposium. Artiu had spent practically every waking moment until now working on his assignments, staying up late, waking up early, working through every report and design in the exacting detail Shockswitch required. Despite his best efforts, however, the work had kept piling up.

Shockswitch had made it clear that he was disappointed, before he’d left. If Artiu couldn’t even complete a normal workload, he certainly didn’t deserve to take time off to visit the symposium, since it would only leave him further behind.

It didn’t stop him from wanting to go.

With one last tired sigh of air through his vents, Artiu looked around the office. The plain, blank walls and sharply ordered datapads felt stiflingly regimented. There was nothing in the office to fidget with, no room for him to pace as he worked. The only thing he could do here would be to go back to staring at his work, and if he did that he might just give in to the urge to throw away the entire datapad.

Remembering Shockswitch’s reaction to the last time he’d broken equipment was more than enough to stop that urge. He clenched his hands in an attempt to dispel the phantom itch of sealant on his palms.

_R2 stared in disbelief down at the sparkling, crackling mess on the workbench. He’d been right about the wiring, he realized numbly. Set up this way, the feedback to the power cell was too much, and without grounding the entire device was one seething mass of sparks and smoke._

_“No… no no no no no,” Artiu jerked to his feet, knocking over his stool. He nearly stumbled over it as he backed away from the workbench. His entire frame felt cold and clumsy, utterly detached from the burning solar flare of his spark._

_He had to stop it before the entire thing melted or exploded. R2 cast around for the fire extinguisher. He had to stumble to the other side of the room to retrieve it, and he nearly fumbled the catch before he could open it, but eventually the entire device was covered in flame-retardant foam._

_R2’s hands were shaking as he dropped the canister aside. He had to… had to…_

_The device. Had to fix it before Shockswitch got back. If Shockswitch came back and found it ruined he would…_

_His fingers wouldn’t work properly. The shaking seemed to have settled into his joints, only instead of loosening, his knuckles felt harder to close or even to move at all._

_The entire workbench was still splattered with the fire-retardant foam, but the power cell was still connected. He needed to get it out if he wanted to shut the device down._

_It would shock him if he touched it. There was supposed to be some electricity-resistant gloves somewhere in the lab, but R2 couldn’t remember where._

_His chronometer pinged at him. Shockswitch’s class was finished. It wouldn’t be long before he was back here at the lab and wanting to know just what R2 had done to his work. Maybe, if he showed Shockswitch the wiring and explained that the power was too much for it, he would at least recognize that R2’s original plan would work, even if they had to rush to rebuild it._

_The door clicked open behind him._

_“R2071,” Shockswitch said. R2 spun to see his mentor standing in the doorway, his optics fixed on the workbench._

_“What is this?” His guardian hissed. “I told you to finish this, not to ruin the entire project!”_

_Every explanation R2 had been preparing fled his mind as Shockswitch stalk closer._

_“I had—wrongly, I see—believed that I could trust you to follow simple instructions!” Shockwitch advanced, driving R2 back until he was pressed up against the workbench. “I gave you one single simple task, and a generous allotment of time in which to complete it! This should have been done long before I returned, and yet I come in to find that you have utterly destroyed it.”_

_“The-the-the wiring,” R2 stammered, and Shockswitch snarled._

_“I don’t care about your fragging excuses!” Shockswitch interrupted. “You and the Primus-damned wiring! If you cannot complete even the simplest task in the lab, I am forced to conclude that you are unfit for a position as my assistant.”_

_R2’s vocalizer would not work, but he shook his head desperately._

_Shockswitch stared down at him coldly. “I’m afraid that is how it looks,” he said. “You have proven that you cannot handle the responsibility of working on projects on your own. Until I decide that you have shown me otherwise, you will do nothing in this lab without my explicit order. Do you understand me?”_

_R2 nodded, but Shockswitch grabbed him by a helm ridge and yanked. “That isn’t an answer,” he said, squeezing hard enough to dent. “I said, do you understand me?”_

_“I understand, Shockswitch.” R2’s voice was crackling with static, but it must have been enough for Shockswitch, who released him with a little shove toward the workbench._

_“Now clean up this mess.”_

_“It still—“ R2 started to say, only to be cut off by a livid look from Shockswitch._

_R2 cut himself off so quickly that his vocalizer emitted a blat of squealing sound. His project still sat on the tabletop, sparking. The protective gloves were still somewhere in the lab, but with Shockswitch’s optics on him, he didn’t dare step away to search for them._

_The first time he tried to pick the device up, he was shocked so badly he nearly dropped it to the floor. Shockswitch didn’t say anything. Screwing up his courage, he picked it up again, he gripped the device tightly, so that even when his fingers spasmed, he wouldn’t drop it._

Since then, Shockswitch had completely revoked all of Artiu’s access codes. He could only be in the lab when Shockswitch was, and he was usually assigned to only the menial tasks Shockswitch didn’t want to do himself. It meant a lot of repetitive welding, cutting, and wiring while Shockswitch loomed over him, ready to correct every little mistake.

On top of that, Shockswitch assigned him an endless string of busywork assignments designing hypothetical machines within impossible parameters and _tsk-_ ing over every solution Artiu managed to cobble together.

It was those assignments that had been his downfall, and he still had three more to struggle through before Shockswitch would even consider letting him attend the symposium. If only he could find some standard design that would work for each prompt, he would be able to get through them faster, but for each assignment he only wasted precious time searching with nothing to show for it.

Artiu rose to pace the length of the office when his optics caught on the door. Shockswitch wanted him to have it done by the time he came back, when the symposium drew to a close for the day, but he hadn’t said where. Had implied it by closing the door, but he hadn’t actually given Artiu an order.

He couldn’t go into the workroom, but he didn’t have to go there, either. As long as he didn’t wander into the symposium where Shockswitch might see him, the entire university was open to him.

Anything was better than sitting here staring pointlessly at his datapad. Mind made up, Artiu slipped out of the office, careful to lock it up behind him.

There were plenty of cubbies and nooks in the university that Artiu knew the students used to study and hang out, but he’d never had time to hunt many of them out. Eventually, he settled for one in the medical department. He’d passed it occasionally on his way to and from Ratchet’s office, and it was usually quiet.

Today proved to be no exception. The little circle of four chairs and the low table in the middle of them were completely empty. No doubt all the students who would have been using it were either taking the day off with their professors gone, or with their professors in the symposium itself.

It was a depressing thought, and Artiu plopped himself down in a seat and turned his datapad on again. He had to finish this work if he wanted to join those students. He leaned forward over his datapad as he pulled up Shockswitch’s instructions and his drafting program, and got to work.

He’d been there for nearly a joor when someone stopped in front of him.

Artiu jerked his helm up, and had only a moment to realize he was looking at red and teal instead of Shockswitch’s colors when the unfamiliar mech spoke. “Pardon me,” he said. He was resting one hand on the back of the chair across from Artiu. “Would I be disturbing you if I sat here a moment? It won’t be very long, I’m only waiting for a friend.”

“No, go ahead,” Artiu said. The mech nodded at him, but rather than pulling out a datapad or sitting in silence, the mech continued to look at him.

“If I may, which section of the conference are you here for?” the mech asked.

Artiu tried not to hunch his shoulders, but his optics dropped down. “I’m… not here for the conference.”

“Ah, so you’re a student at Iacon, then?” the mech said, just as cheerfully as before. “Ah, yes, I suppose it is that time of year. Have you a field of study, then?”

He was sitting across from Artiu, his elbows resting against his knees as he leaned forward. He had some sort of alt-mode kibble attached to his shoulder, and no wheels that Artiu could see. Some sort of dedicated science equipment for an alt-mode, maybe? In any case there was no real reason that he should be taking an interest in Artiu.

And yet he seemed completely absorbed in this conversation with Artiu.

“Mechanical engineering and design innovation,” Artiu answered, and to his surprise, the mech’s optics brightened.

“My!” he said cheerfully. “Quite a complex field of work!”

Artiiu hunched over his datapad. “Not exactly,” he mumbled.

“Well, I suppose that does depend somewhat on the nature of your designs, but at the very least you must have an applicable understanding of chemistry and physics to properly create a design that most effectively uses the materials of its components, and truly lasts,” the mech said. If anything, he was leaning forward more now, optics bright and interested. Then he pulled back with a chuckle. “Ah, but forgive my impassioned ramblings. I have faced the occasional disagreement with my colleagues about the role played by technology in our work. The fact of the matter is that without many of the technological innovations that your work brings about, the world of so-called pure science would not advance.”

Before Artiu could work through the mech’s quick speech and come up with a reply, the mech glanced to the side and visibly straightened, even from Artiu’s hunched position. “Ah, there my friend is,” he said, lifting a hand to wave. “Ratchet!”

Artiu jerked around.

Sure enough, there Ratchet was, coming around the corner toward their circle of chairs. He nodded to Perceptor, then stopped with his hand resting on the back of Artiu’s chair. “Hey, kid,” he said, and Artiu nodded silently back. He’d hoped to see Ratchet sometime before the end of the symposium, but he hadn’t expected it to happen like this.

“Perceptor, you couldn’t wait for me to get here to start talking someone’s audials off, could you?” Ratchet said, grinning. “And I bet you didn’t even make introductions first.”

Perceptor. Artiu felt his optics go wide, and his hands went tight on his datapad. Perceptor as in Crystal City’s Perceptor? And Ratchet was _friends_  with him?

Perceptor just laughed. “That may perhaps have fallen to the wayside,” he admitted. “But it seems you’re more capable of making those introductions than I am, Ratchet?”

 “Sure,” Ratchet nodded. “Perceptor, this is Artiu, something of an unofficial student of mine. Artiu, this is Perceptor. He’s the head of research at the University in Crystal City, and a friend of mine.”

“A pleasure to officially meet you!” Perceptor said with a smile. “Any friend of Ratchet’s is a friend of mine.”

Artiu ducked his helm in a nod, since he didn’t think his vocalizer would work if he tried it. Talking to Ratchet was one thing. Ratchet made plenty of sharp comments, but he never got mad at Artiu for not knowing something yet, and tolerated his mistakes. Messing up in front of someone like Perceptor was exactly why Shockswitch didn’t want him to go to the symposium. He could only keep quiet and hope that Ratchet took up most of Perceptor’s attention.

As though he was reading Artiu’s mind, Ratchet turned toward Perceptor. “Have you had energon yet?”

Perceptor shook his helm. “No, I haven’t had the time. Between the dissertations and the panels, I simply haven’t had enough of a break to find the dining facilities, much less get through a crowd to actually get any energon.”

“I thought so,” Ratchet nodded. He pulled out a cube and handed it off to Perceptor. “On a busy day like this, it’s not worth bothering with the crowds. There’s a dispenser in the lounge that works just as well.”

“Quite an expedient solution, Ratchet,” Perceptor commented, taking a large gulp of his cube.

“What about you, Artiu?”

“I’m fine, I don’t need any energon,” Artiu said quickly. “Really,” he added, when Ratchet continued to watch him.

“All right, kid,” Ratchet said. He stepped around Artiu’s chair, then paused. “Mind if we sit here for a while? Symposium’s in recess for the moment.”

“It’s fine,” Artiu said. He picked up his datapad again. He could keep working while the two of them talked, and maybe the sound of their conversation in the background would make it easier for him to work out the actual dimensions he needed this ship to be.

“So, Artiu,” Ratchet said. Artiu looked up to find Ratchet and Perceptor both looking at him. Ratchet had acquired his own cube of energon, and he gestured with it toward Artiu’s datapad. “More work?”

Artiu glanced guiltily down at the datapad and the nearly abandoned stylus. “Yes,” he said, pulling it closer to his chassis. “Shockswitch wants this done today.”

“I take it you’re not going to be visiting the symposium events, then?” Ratchet asked.

“No,” Artiu mumbled.

“That’s a shame,” Perceptor interjected. “It is quite an event. However—I do believe they film and preserve the talks. As a student at Iacon University, you ought to have access to them through the school, is that correct, Ratchet?”

“I don’t know if that’s the case, but it’s worth a shot,” Ratchet said with a shrug. “If it’s professor-only access, let me know, kid. I can send you a couple.”

“Thanks,” Artiu mumbled, ducking his head. He was equal parts embarrassed and grateful for the offer. It wasn’t what he really wanted, but even seeing recordings of the symposium talks would be better than nothing.

“They are quite useful,” Perceptor said. “I’m going to have to look up a few myself—I don’t know what they were thinking, scheduling Seismo and Ampere’s talks at the same time. Rivalry or not, hearing the two of them talk is necessary.”

Perceptor rambled on, with Ratchet interjecting every so often. Artiu tried to keep track of the conversation, but discussion had moved on to some scientist with a theory that Artiu had never even heard of, so he ducked his helm and tried to focus on his work instead.

And it required all of his attention. The shuttle design he was supposed to be making was not coming together, no matter how he tried to play with the shielding designs.

He only realized he’d made a sound of frustration when Perceptor made a questioning sound at him.

“Difficult project?”

 “Just… complicated,” Artiu mumbled.

“Yours always are, kid,” Ratchet said. “What is it this time?”

Artiu hesitated. Shockswitch insisted that he work his projects without ‘interference’ or outside assistance. During one particularly impassioned moment, he’d called it petty thievery, and said that if Artiu ever wanted to amount to anything, he would have to learn how to do things himself, and do them correctly.

Shockswitch ranted just as often about untrustworthy academics. For all their supposed expertise, he said, his fellows believed some completely ridiculous theories that hardly had the chance to be proved, and he didn’t want any student of his being misled by junk science. Shockswitch didn’t like him using sources he hadn’t personally vetted. Artiu understood it, but it always made these assignments terribly difficult. Someone had to have designed some of these things before he had, but since he went into each new design blindly, he never knew if he was on the wrong track until Shockswitch had reviewed his work and told him that he was trying something that could not possibly work.

“Neither Ratchet nor I are skilled engineers, of course,” Perceptor said as Ratchet nodded along, “so unfortunately we cannot offer suggestions to direct your work. However, when I find myself stuck on a project, it is often useful to talk about my difficulties with a friend or a colleague. Even if they are not an expert, explaining the processes involved can be enough to promote an epiphany on the course of action required to continue.”

“Just talking about it?” Artiu asked, glancing between them.

“Sure, kid,” Ratchet agreed. “You remember me telling you about those group assignments I was making for my class? It’s not always true for trauma medics who have to act on the spot, but being willing to consult with colleagues on a diagnosis is a good practice.”

“It’s not… cheating?”

Ratchet actually laughed. Perceptor looked utterly confused at the suggestion. “Well, I suppose there is the chance that a rival might attempt to steal the idea, but really, with a project already underway it’s unlikely that they would have time to duplicate the experiment and publish before you except for the most underhanded of tactics…”

“No, kid, it’s not cheating,” Ratchet interrupted. He wasn’t laughing any more. “Some mechs might like to play like science is a one-mech game, but the whole community gets a say in your results sooner or later. Getting a second opinion early in the process isn’t a bad idea.”

“… Oh.” Artiu looked down at his lap. “Is that… all fields? I mean, are you sure it’s not just a medical thing?”

“Goodness, no,” Perceptor interjected. “It is one of the basic principles of research, in fact! Of course, the degree to which individuals adhere to working with others varies, but many of the presentations going on at this symposium are part of the process. Most of the scientists here will incorporate the questions they are asked on their work here into their future projects.”

“That’s…” Artiu couldn’t think of the words to describe it, so he trailed off instead. It wasn’t like what Shockswitch would say at all. “Do you really think it will help?” he asked instead.

“Well, it couldn’t hurt to try!” Perceptor said. He was smiling, and leaning forward again, the way he had when it was just him and Artiu. When Artiu glanced from him to Ratchet, the medic was nodding to him. He had the same look to his faceplates that he did when they met in his office, his usual scowl softened around the edges.

After another moment of hesitant consideration, Artiu finally nodded and held the datapad out in their direction. “I don’t know how much you know about non-sparked shuttle systems, but they have to balance between weight, engine power, and shield generation,” he told them. “And I’m supposed to be increasing the shield output on this model by a factor of three without dramatically increasing the weight. I can’t find any higher-output shield generator under 5 kilos, though.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Ratchet agreed. “Any shuttle that needs that much shielding is going to be a size class up, anyway.”

“So what else do you have in mind?” Perceptor asked.

“Well… I was thinking, instead of doing a shield generator which channeled to specific projection points, it would make more sense to make multiple shield generators integrated throughout the hull. Those could be made out of lighter materials, and they wouldn’t go down all at once if something went wrong. For a small ship, it wouldn’t be significantly more maintenance the way it would be on a larger shuttle.”

Ratchet nodded. “Makes sense,” he said. “So what’s the problem with it?”

“If I do that, I have to redesign the whole ship,” Artiu explained, staring gloomily down at the scribbles covering his datapad. “I have to make space for the shielding components in the hull armor of the ship, and I also have to rebalance the ship to account for the new weight distribution.”

“I believe the distribution of projection points on a normal shield generation system is placed for optimum coverage, are they not?” Perceptor asked. “And you would be removing those systems anyway.”

“They’re already balanced,” Artiu agreed slowly. “There’s some weight difference between the shield generator units and the projection units, but it’s within the threshold of the ship’s hull already, and since they’re all the same weight and roughly the same size, nothing else needs to change. But I still need to account for the removal of the generator unit itself…”

“Well, what does this thing need to do?” Ratchet asked. “Strong shields like that are usually useful for long trips out into deep space, where solar winds and asteroid fields are a problem.”

“And this ship isn’t equipped to go that far,” Artiu muttered. “If it’s supposed to go farther into space, it would need more fuel… I can’t add more to the tanks section without unbalancing the ship but the only reason there was no fuel storage around the shield generator is the potential for catastrophic damage to both systems should one of them be damaged. So I could add an extra fuel tank there instead! And some other storage space, maybe a heavy cargo space, to balance it as the fuel runs dry. Additional pumping and regulation systems would also help keep things balanced…”

He snatched up the datapad and started scribbling things down, muttering to himself all the while. It was only when he’d finished noting down all the modifications that he’d have to make that he remembered that Ratchet and Perceptor were still there, and that he’d completely ignored them.

He flinched and looked up again, but the both of them were nodding at him and smiling.

“It appears this did help after all!” Perceptor said cheerfully. “Wonderful! I must say, it is always a delight when a project begins to come together.”

“We should leave you to work,” Ratchet said, getting to his pedes, “and we have more talks to attend before the day is through. But comm me when this round of projects is over, kid.”

“It was a pleasure to meet you, Artiu,” Perceptor beamed as he rose. “I wish you good luck with your ongoing projects!”

“Thank you,” Artiu mumbled. It felt hard to talk around the light, fluttery feeling in his spark. He had to sit there for a moment and take it in. He’d just been helped by Perceptor. Perceptor! A mech whose name even he knew. Perceptor was the one solely responsible for the growing fame of Crystal City’s scientific community, and he’d not only seemed eager to meet Artiu, he’d complimented him and helped him with his project. And he was Ratchet’s friend! Shockswitch would never believe it if Artiu told him.

… But Artiu couldn’t tell him, because that would mean mentioning that he’d left the office, and even if he did finish this project sooner than expected, Shockswitch would be angry to learn that Artiu had bent the rules.

Quickly, Artiu saved his work and got to his pedes. He still had time left before Shockswitch would be scheduled to come back, but suddenly the thought of being caught out made it difficult to work.

He locked himself back in the office to work, and despite the compulsion to constantly check his chronometer, he managed to get well into the revisions to the ship’s design that he needed to make. In fact, by the time Shockswitch actually stepped into the office, ahead of schedule, Artiu was completing the finishing touches on the design after reviewing the entire thing for errors.

Shockswitch was carrying a number of datapads and practically beaming when he stepped through the door.

It was such an unusual expression on him that Artiu couldn’t help but stare. Shockswitch didn’t even seem to notice it as he set the datapads along his desk, squaring them off in a prominent space in the center.

 “Did it go well?” Artiu asked, peeking over the top of his datapad.

“Quite,” Shockswitch said. When he finished with the datapads, he moved on to his personal console. After a moment to turn the thing on, his attention turned on the screen, where he was rapidly inputting information, the clacking of keys a background to his voice. “There was a good deal of representation at those meetings, and high turnout. I have no doubt that a good deal of attention and funding will be coming my way before long.”

“That’s good,” Artiu hazarded.

“Yes, R2071, it is.”

The sound of his serial number was jarring. He’d gotten used to the modified shorthand version that Ratchet used for him, and Shockswitch so rarely addressed him directly. It felt off, like a piece of plating that was just a bit too loose, but Artiu didn’t know how to bring it up with Shockswitch, so he fell silent instead. Shockswitch didn’t seem to notice. His attention was on the console in front of him.

Artiu turned back to his own work. He’d finished the design and started to summarize the different configurations he’d considered but ultimately discarded for the design when he heard Shockswitch shift.

This time when he looked up, his mentor was standing in front of him with a hand extended expectantly. “Let’s see what you’ve done,” he said.

Artiu saved his work and handed the datapad over silently. He watched Shockswitch review it, but instead of the usual glower, Shockswitch’s expression was calmly thoughtful, and didn’t change as his optics darted over the surface of the pad.

Eventually he tucked the datapad into his subspace. “This is well done,” he said with a nod. “You accomplished everything in a reasonable time, for your usual pace. You will still have work to accomplish, but I see no reason why you could not accompany me to the symposium for a portion of tomorrow’s schedule.”

Artiu nearly stalled out for a moment. “Really?” he stammered.

He’d only finished this one project. Had he really proven himself, just like that? Or was Shockswitch going easy on him because he was in a good mood?

“Yes,” Shockswitch said. He was smiling, a rare thing, and he patted Artiu on the pauldron as he did, an equally unusual gesture that left Artiu’s plating tingling in its wake. “You wanted to see it, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Artiu agreed. “I just,” and he cut himself off, before he could say something stupid and give Shockswitch a reason not to take him. He didn’t know what to do with Shockswitch’s unexpected generosity. The pit of his tank felt queasy, but he forced himself to ignore it. He’d proven himself capable of the work Shockswitch wanted him to do. He should be happy about that.

“Well, then. That’s settled,” Shockswitch said, stepping back as though he hadn’t heard Artiu’s stumbling words. “You’ll need a polish before we go out…” He stared into a middle distance for a moment before nodding. “It’s early enough. We’ll leave now and take care of it before tomorrow.”

“Leave now?” Artiu echoed, but Shockswitch was already making his way to the door.

“Yes. The place will be overrun if we delay, if we even make it there through the traffic at the end of the shift,” Shockswitch said, pausing only long enough to give Artiu a look that sent him scrambling out of his chair. Once he was certain Artiu was following, he stepped out of the room at his usual quick pace, without even a glance backwards.


	6. Ratchet: Two steps back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With the Symposium over, life moves on, and Ratchet spends some time away from the University for once. It almost goes well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, all! Sorry for the long wait. As I've said in some of the comments and on tumblr, I've been going through some pretty intensive life changes, after finishing up my undergrad in the spring. Things have finally settled out, but my free time is limited, and this chapter was fighting me. I wish I could give an estimate on the next one, but chapter seven has been fighting me too. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy the update, in the meantime! Things do not go particularly well in this chapter.

“My,” Perceptor said, stretching his arms up over his helm. “Now that was a very successful Symposium, wouldn’t you say?”

Ratchet didn’t bother to roll his helm forward. He stayed slumped back in his desk chair, optics offline, and grunted acknowledgement to Perceptor. “I don’t know how you still have energy,” he grumbled.

“Oh, seeing Foci will do that to a mech,” Perceptor chuckled. Ratchet could hear him shifting around in the guest chair. “But it’s just as well that everything’s wrapped up, isn’t it?”

“If I have to go to one more damned pandering event...” Ratchet groaned.

“You’ll get drunk and do something regrettable, I know,” Perceptor said. If Perceptor were closer, Ratchet was sure he’d be getting a pat. “You say it every year. I hope it doesn’t apply to our plans?”

Ratchet lifted his helm at last. “That’s just you and Ironhide,” he said. “And the whole point is to get drunk. It doesn’t count.”

“Just us?” Perceptor said, blinking. “Ah, yes, I suppose that is traditional.”

“Were you expecting someone else?” Ratchet said dryly. “We’re lucky we’re even getting Ironhide to come with us.” Going out for drinks together after the Symposium finished was a tradition they’d started since Perceptor had relocated to Crystal City—a way to wind down and catch up without University ‘sensibilities’ getting offended about a microscope, a medic, and a bodyguard enjoying one another’s company.

“I thought you might have invited that student of yours,” Perceptor said.

“Student of—? Artiu isn’t my student,” Ratchet frowned, pushing himself up in his chair to catch a better look at Perceptor’s faceplates. “He’s an engineering student. Where’d you get that idea?”  

“Isn’t he?” Perceptor said, leaning forward. “You certainly took the opportunity to teach him when we stopped to talk. And you knew who I was talking about immediately,” he added. His optics were bright in the way that meant he thought he was onto something.

“Only because his mentor wouldn’t,” Ratchet muttered, hitching his arms up further over his chestplate. “Anyway, he wouldn’t be able to come.” Perceptor was giving him an odd look for that, but Ratchet ignored it in order to lever himself up out of his chair. “Let’s get going,” he said. “Ironhide’ll be waiting for us. I can tell you on the way.” Just the thought of Shockswitch was enough to sour his mood, and with his temper already frayed at the edges from the inanities required by the Symposium, he’d snap at someone if he started talking about it here.

Perceptor, to his credit, nodded and trailed Ratchet out of the medical building in silence. The hallways were blessedly empty, with the closing of the Symposium, the other academics were no doubt attending their own unofficial soirees or on their way back to their respective homes already. Ratchet appreciated it—the empty hallways made it easier for them to make it outside without delays.  

It was late enough that the Iacon roadways were thick with mechs, but the traffic around the University had eased some. Ratchet dropped down into his alt, and Perceptor, with some judicious application of mass displacement, was soon slipping inside of his alt mode in a practiced maneuver.

Perceptor waited until Ratchet had pulled out into traffic to start prodding at him again. “So, did you send him an invitation?”

“You’re impatient,” Ratchet huffed, but he was stalling and he knew it. “I did,” he said, before Perceptor could call him on it, “but the kid couldn’t come.”

“I suppose he was rather busy when we came across him,” Perceptor mused. “I don’t recall coming across him during the rest of the Symposium, though that’s not so unusual in an event as eminently attended as this one.” Perceptor’s fingers were drumming against Ratchet’s interior now, in the way he tended to do when he was thinking. “I would not consider it curious not to run into him for the rest of the Symposium when our fields of study are all so divergent. It does, however, seem odd that a student of his level would be assigned so much work right before the Symposium. It is not an everyday event, after all, even for students in Iacon.”

“You can blame his mentor for that,” Ratchet said.

“You said something to that effect before,” Perceptor said. “The mech is strict?”

“That’s putting it lightly,” Ratchet hissed. He had to forcibly throttle his engine to keep from speeding ahead and invading the space of the mech driving in front of him.

Perceptor actually jumped at the vehemence in Ratchet’s voice, but he was patting at Ratchet’s frame before he could actually get out an apology. “I am beginning to get the impression that there is something more than professional dislike involved here,” Perceptor said delicately.

“I couldn’t care less about Shockswitch—his mentor,” Ratchet said. “It’s the kid I’m worried about.”

He’d intended to leave it there, but Perceptor’s hand was a familiar, reassuring weight against Ratchet’s interior, and Ratchet’s irritation burst free through a dam worn thin with concern. “I’m fairly certain that Shockswitch is his guardian, as well as his mentor. And I’m not certain on that because even mentioning the mech will send the kid back into his shell faster than anything,” Ratchet groused. “But _whoever_ the kid’s guardian is, he doesn’t take care of him in the least. He’s over-worked and under-rested, and I’m certain that I’m the only medic the kid has seen in the time I’ve known him.”

“It sounds,” Perceptor said slowly, “as though he’s needed one.”

“Several times,” Ratchet confirmed. Memories of his first meeting with Artiu flashed through his helm, and his burned palms, and Ratchet had to choke back his engine before he started speeding again.

He couldn’t see Perceptor’s expression like this, but it was easy enough to tell that he was troubled, from the way his posture curled against Ratchet’s cab. “That is worrisome. I had thought him shy, from his reaction to showing us his work, but in retrospect…”

“Probably also because of his mentor,” Ratchet agreed grimly. “The mech is ‘results-oriented,’ from his reputation.” He spat the word like a curse.

“Troubling indeed,” Perceptor agreed. “And even more a shame that he couldn’t escape his duties to join us. A night of freedom would do him some good, I suspect.”

Probably not enough to risk the wrath of leaving his mentor’s supervision, Ratchet suspected, but by that point he was finally pulling up to Macaddam’s. “Some other time, maybe,” Ratchet said, transforming apart the side of his cab to let Perceptor step out. That done, Ratchet transformed, trying to shake off the tension accumulated from driving around the crowded roads of Iacon and the conversation.

“But that’s enough of that, isn’t it?” he said, turning back to Perceptor, who’d returned to his usual, tall but spindly form. “We’re here to have a good time.”

“That we are,” Perceptor smiled. “We shall have to hurry to find Ironhide. I have no doubt he’s gotten a lead on us already.”

“I’m sure,” Ratchet agreed, leading the way inside.

They stepped inside to dim lights and the dull roar of mechs talking and laughing together. The tables were crowded, dotted with the varicolored glow of engex, as different as the frametypes that surrounded them. Ratchet could already feel his armor relaxing and his cabling unwinding. The Universities might be the intellectual jewel of Iacon, or even Cybertron as some claimed, but places like this were at its heart.

Not just because of the engex, either.

A comm burst pulled Ratchet’s attention up, and he caught sight of a flash of red waving to them before he recognized Ironhide, sitting at one of the booths along the far wall. Ratchet picked up his pace with a nod to direct Perceptor, and together they wound their way through the crowd.

Ironhide clapped Perceptor on the back hard enough to make the slender mech stumble. “Percy!” He crowed, grinning widely. “Good to see you.”

Despite the force behind Ironhide’s greeting, Perceptor was beaming. “And you as well, Ironhide,” he said, sliding into the booth. His scope shifted away, transforming up and back until it clicked into place on his back, rather than blocking his field of view. “Has the guard been treating you well?”

Ironhide scoffed, but it wasn’t enough to stop his grin. “Same as always,” he said, shaking his helm. “Ask me when the current crop of Senators phases out, and I might say something else.”

“Ah. Decimus is still causing you trouble?” Perceptor said knowingly.

“And Proteus, and Novus,” Ironhide agreed, shaking his helm. “And the rest of the lot.”

“Of course,” Ratchet agreed wryly. “Just like the hospital’s giving me slag about which patients I accept, and the University’s trying to cart me away, and the creaking cogs in Crystal City are being stingy with their funding. What else is new?”

“A good deal, I’ll have you know,” Perceptor retorted, “and you know it.”

“He’s just being a rusty old grouch,” Ironhide said, reaching out to give Ratchet a friendly shake.

Ratchet kicked him under the table. “I’ll show you grumpy.”

Ironhide just laughed it off. “C’mon,” he said, shaking Ratchet’s shoulder one last time before letting him go with a friendly but forceful pat to the pauldron. “Let’s get you some engex, that’ll cheer you up.”

It was Ratchet’s turn to scoff, but he joined Ironhide in waving down a bartender anyway. He’d come here to drink, and he wasn’t going to call that off, fraggit!

 

Seeing Perceptor off the next morning was a quiet affair, after all the hubbub of the Symposium and their cheerful gathering the night before. Ironhide had left Perceptor with his usual farewells at Maccadam’s, for a Senate shift he had to make the next morning just before Perceptor’s shuttle would leave for Crystal City.

The drive over was almost peaceful. The roads weren’t empty, of course, because this was Iacon, but the traffic wasn’t bad, and Perceptor, nestled in his frame, made a good driving companion.

When they reached the station, Perceptor paused before going inside, and turned back to Ratchet with a quiet smile. “This is it, then,” he said, tilting his helm. He reached out to pat Ratchet on the arm, his expression a fond smile. “I have no doubt I will be back in Iacon sooner or later, but take care of yourself until then, you hear?”

“Hah!” Ratchet laughed. “You’re one to talk. Don’t get yourself into any trouble you can’t get out of over there in the middle of nowhere.”

“I never do,” Perceptor replied impishly. Then his cheerful  smirk faded into something softer, more warm. His hand slid down to Ratchet’s, and he gave it a careful squeeze. “I do mean it. Take care of yourself,” he said. “Do not whittle yourself down trying to be everywhere and everything.”

“I know better than that by now,” Ratchet retorted. It wasn’t entirely true. He’d realized, while preparing for Perceptor’s visit, just how much he’d had to whittle down his commitments to accommodate his friend’s visit. Most of that could be attributed to the Symposium, but Ratchet couldn’t deny that previous years had been much easier than this one.

“It’s the price of success,” he grumbled. “But you’re right,” he added, shaking his helm. “Maybe next time I’ll come to visit you in the middle of nowhere instead.”

“That sounds splendid!” Perceptor said, clapping his hands together in a display of cheerful enthusiasm. “I shall hold you to it.”

“Of course you will. You’d better make it worth my time,” Ratchet smirked, crossing his arms. “Now go, before you wind up stuck here.

The station speakers crackled with a boarding call, and Perceptor turned with one final wave. “Pass my greetings on to Ironhide and to Artiu, if you would,” he called.

“I will,” Ratchet shouted back, as Perceptor hurried down the platform. It wasn’t long before Perceptor’s slim form disappeared into the shuttle, but Ratchet lingered a while longer, until the shuttle lifted into the sky.

 

As he checked his chronometer, Ratchet wondered if he’d made a mistake.

_Enough. Either he makes it or he doesn’t._

The café Ratchet was sitting in was a little hole in the wall place, not far from the University. The distance from the main campus and the plain exterior made it an unappealing choice to most students and faculty, but it was a quiet place, good for studying and grading when staying at the school was threatening to drive him up a wall.  Ratchet liked it because it was closer to the hospital than the medical education buildings.

It was also where he should have been meeting Artiu as of ten kliks ago.

Ratchet sighed, and set aside his datapad. He wasn’t making any progress, anyway. Every time he saw someone walking by outside, he was looking up from his work to check for Artiu’s drab gray and white.

Perceptor’s comment about Artiu needing some freedom had stuck with Ratchet. Getting away from his mentor and the campus probably would do him some good, even if a night of drinking was out of the question.

After a few more meetings in his office, Ratchet had suggested this place. Artiu had seemed nervous at the suggestion, but he’d agreed at the time. Now, Ratchet was beginning to wonder if Artiu had been put off by the suggestion but hadn’t been able to say anything to Ratchet directly.

Ratchet picked up his datapad again, determined to at least get some work done. If Artiu didn’t show up, then Ratchet wouldn’t suggest they meet somewhere other than his office. That was if the kid hadn’t been held up by his mentor. It had happened before, often with little or no warning.

Ratchet was interrupted in the midst of reactivating his datapad and taking a sip of his cube by the sound of the door opening with a clatter. He was halfway turned back to his work before he realized that it was Artiu standing in the doorway, his hands clenched together in what Ratchet had learned to recognize as an anxious gesture.

He was scanning the room, frame tense, but his posture melted into one of relief when he caught sight of Ratchet waving him over. He hurried over and fumbled his way into the chair opposite Ratchet. His fans were buzzing, and his shoulders were hunched.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” Artiu said in a rush. “I didn’t mean to be, I should have left earlier, but Shockswitch wanted to go over some assignments and that took a while, but I hurried here as fast as I could.”

“Glad you could make it,” Ratchet said, gently cutting Artiu off. “Did you have trouble finding the place?”

“Not really,” Artiu started to say, then amended it with a wince. “A little. But your directions helped. I didn’t realize there were so many places you didn’t have to drive to around the University.”

“It’s hard to find, until you know it’s there,” Ratchet said. “The footpaths are left over from before the University grew quite so big, so they’re not as grand as the rest of it. But the atmosphere and the energon are usually worth it. Speaking of…what do you want?”

“Oh.” Artiu started to twist his fingers together, glancing between Ratchet and the little menu card set on the table. “Um, I don’t want to trouble you…”

“Psssh,” Ratchet snorted dismissively. “I remember what being a student was like, believe it or not. Just take the free meal.”

Artiu’s fidgeting continued, but in the end he nodded. “Thanks,” he said quietly.

“You’re welcome, Artiu,” Ratchet said.

That prompted a twitch that Ratchet noted, but didn’t comment on. Asking would probably spook Artiu—better to work into asking if something was wrong later. Instead, he let Artiu put in his order with the server, and turned his attention back to his work.

“Um.”  Ratchet glanced up to find Artiu looking at him, still fidgeting. “Is there… what are you doing?”

“Grading,” Ratchet said, with an exaggerated scowl that made Artiu’s optics brighten a little with amusement. “Essays, this time. No yes or no grading for me.”

“Is it that bad?” Artiu asked, with optics wide.

Ratchet shook his helm. “Some of these students aren’t going to be researchers, that’s for sure,” he said. “There’s only so much accuracy I expect from students doing their first research on specialized medical conditions, but there’s a difference between not knowing and completely misrepresenting your sources.”

“Do they really do that? Why?”

“Presumably they think I don’t look at the papers they’re citing from.” Ratchet snorted. “The best one was the one who made up results for a study that I had published.” Artiu’s optics actually flared with surprise, and Ratchet laughed.

“Did they really?”

“As a major part of their argument, even,” Ratchet shook his helm. “Most of them aren’t that bad.”

Artiu was still looking at him like he wasn’t sure whether to believe him when one of the server drones hovered over. “Cube for Artiu.”

There was another, barely-there twitch, but Artiu reached out to take the cube. “That’s for me.”

Ratchet frowned as the drone buzzed away again. “Something wrong, kid?”

“No, not really,” Artiu said. His fingers were twitching again, as he curled them around his cube. “It’s just kind of weird to hear that.”

It took Ratchet a moment to realize what he meant. “Your name?” he said, frowning. “What, because I call you kid?”

Artiu nodded shyly. “It’s not that I mind. It’s just... I dunno. Shockswitch called me by my full serial recently, and that felt kind of weird too.”

“Full serial?” Ratchet echoed. The sinking feeling he’d had about Artiu’s age was back in the pit of his tanks. Over time he’d started to ignore it, as Artiu hadn’t had any protest of Ratchet’s use of what he’d assumed was his chosen name.

“R2071,” Artiu admitted, his helm ducked down.

Ratchet nearly bit his glossa. The R designation had come into use only about five vorns ago, and with production rates low across the planet, even with his serial number only in the low thousands, Artiu couldn’t be more than a few vorns. Hardly enough time to complete a degree and move on into the kind of research Shockswitch had Artiu doing.

Ratchet remembered now, with sickening clarity, the condition Artiu had been in when he’d first met him. Artiu had told him that he’d had a frame transfer. At the time, Ratchet had assumed that it was from an accident, but now Ratchet had to wonder what he’d transferred _from_. Had Artiu actually been transferred from an interim frame?

Ratchet stared at Artiu. He looked nervous, but he clearly didn’t realize just how much information he’d revealed to Ratchet with that serial number.

“I don’t mind the nickname,” Artiu said. He was starting to fidget again, clearly nervous about Ratchet’s reaction.

Ratchet had to take a moment to grit his dentae together to keep from snapping something angry. Artiu certainly wasn’t the one who deserved to be snapped at.

“Ironhide could tell you, some mechs choose to keep names based on their serials,” Ratchet said instead. “But there’s nothing wrong with choosing something different if you want to.”

“Yeah, I guess…” Artiu mumbled. “How did you decide on your designation?”

It was a redirection, an obvious one, but the question pulled Ratchet out of his grim thoughts. “How did I decide on Ratchet?” he echoed, cycling his optics. “Frag, it’s been centuries. I think…” Ratchet took up his cube in his hand, staring down to it as he thought back. He’d been Ratchet for so much longer than he hadn’t, it was hard to think back to a time when he hadn’t used that designation. “I liked the way the ratchet socket wrenches clicked into place when you turned them. And eventually it clicked as a designation, too,” he said.

“So you just… knew?” Artiu asked. He sounded wistful, and a little worried.

“No. Frag, no. I’m sure I tested out twenty or more in my processor before I decided on that one, and I wasn’t really sure on that one, either.”

This time, Artiu’s only response was a nod. Then again, maybe Ratchet should be prepared not to call him Artiu any more. After a line of questioning like that, Ratchet wouldn’t be surprised if the kid was itching to find something that wasn’t part of his serial number.  

“No need to stress about it, kid,” Ratchet said, reaching out to pat him on the arm. “There’s no rush. You’ll find something that works eventually.”

Artiu looked up at him with gratitude in his optics. “Okay,” he said quietly. There was the slightest tremor to his voice.

Ratchet didn’t want to draw any more attention to it, so instead he shuffled through his stack of datapads, pulling one from the bottom.  “Now, if you’d like, I brought some more material for us to look over.” He set the datapad down between them, and grinned as Artiu leaned in eagerly.

“I’ve been reviewing some materials for an upcoming surgery,” Ratchet said, tapping at the image he’d pulled up on the screen. “This is a new fuel pump that’s been put on the market. They’re being claimed as better at managing variable energon flow. Useful for racer frames, who are jumping up to high speeds at the drop of a pin. They’re a bit more finicky than a standard pump, though, according to some initial reports, so I’m looking them over before I do any procedures or introduce them to my staff.”

“What makes them tricky?” Artiu asked. He was leaning in close to the diagram, and Ratchet pushed the datapad closer to him.

“Those knobby bits along the outside,” Ratchet said, gesturing to the diagram. “They’re prone to catching on things as the pump is installed, and breaking off once it’s inside. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if they aren’t viable in the long term because of it, but protests from just one medic won’t do much, even with my…”

Ratchet trailed off. Artiu’s intense scrutiny broke off as he pulled back, optics wide.

“What is it?”

Artiu shook his helm. “I…” he tapped at the diagram, enlarging a part of it. “I think that’s my design?”

Ratchet reset his optics. “You what?”

“I—I didn’t make a fuel pump,” Artiu stammered, shaking his helm. “But I, Shockswitch told me to make a pump for variable flow rates, to slow depending on the volume coming through. It was one of the ones I did before the Symposium. I remember—that part there, with the shrinking channels, and the mechanisms with the sticky-outy bits. I remember drawing that.”

Artiu’s hands were shaking now, as he pointed to the diagram. “Shockswitch took that datapad,” he said, staring down at the diagram. “I don’t—how did they get it?”

Several of Ratchet’s nasty suspicions crystallized into certainty as he stared down at the diagram. “What kind of system were you thinking of when you made that design?” he asked.

“I thought it was a piping system, or something for a ship! Not something that was supposed to go into a mech!” Artiu said. His voice was beginning to waver, as his optics paled. “It was just supposed to have one channel! This looks like, like someone tried to shove them into too small a space, they’ll hit each other and break like this…”

 “Hold on, there,” Ratchet said, patting Artiu on the hand. Artiu’s optics darted over toward him. Ratchet did his best to dampen the rage rising in him like a lightning storm. “Your plans might not have been designed for this, but they’re holding together for long enough that we can issue a warning and get mechs in for a replacement. They’ve been finicky, as I said, so they’re not too popular. The only thing I need to know is how your design got into this, if this is really your work.”

Artiu shook his head. “I don’t know. Shockswitch has it. It’s just an assignment.”

Ratchet frowned. “Artiu, it had to get into a medical journal somehow. Do you know what Shockswitch was doing with it? Because I don’t have either of your names in here at all.”

“I don’t!” Artiu said, nearly snapping as his optics flared. “They’re not even that good, no one should be using them…”

“Is that what Shockswitch told you?” Ratchet said, his voice rising in incredulous anger. “That you’re no good at this? Kid, you’ve been working nonstop from the very first day I met you. Either your mentor isn’t doing a good job of mentoring you, or he’s lying.”

Artiu jerked back in his seat, already shaking his helm. “No! He wouldn’t…”

“Take your work and sell it off without your permission?” Ratchet continued, leaning forward as he braced himself on the table. Artiu was leaning back, looking anywhere but at Ratchet. “Take advantage of you? He hasn’t done a single thing to take care of you since I’ve seen him.”

“Don’t say that!” Artiu said, his voice catching. “He does a lot for me, he looks out for me, he’s my mentor!”

“He treats you like slag!” Ratchet retorted. “You don’t have a moment to yourself, you’re hanging at his beck and call, you never have a chance to do anything you enjoy, and every time you come to my office I could swear you’re hiding from him!”

Artiu flinched like he’d been hit.

“Frag.” Ratchet realized, abruptly, that the look on Artiu’s face was fear. He forced himself to sit back in his seat. To keep his hands on the table, away from Artiu, and where he could see them. “Kid, I’m sorry. This isn’t your fault, and I shouldn’t have shouted at you.”

Artiu’s stumbled as he got to his pedes, rattling their energon on the table as he did so. “I have to go,” he said, in a voice that shook. “Thank you for the energon.” Then he turned and fled.

Ratchet watched the door fall shut behind him, then scrubbed his hands over his faceplates. “Frag,” he hissed. “ _Frag.”_


	7. Artiu: Two breaths from drowning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Artiu is just trying to get by and forget the disastrous revelations from his last meeting with Ratchet. It's not as easy as he might have hoped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THIS TOOK SO MUCH LONGER THAN I MEANT IT TO. Between a pretty severe attack of writer's block and numerous rewrites to this chapter because I wasn't satisfied with it, this has been a long time coming. Finishing this chapter has also drastically changed the ways I thought this fic would go, so the next two chapters are going to have a very different trajectory than I originally thought. 
> 
> That said: we're in the home stretch! Only two more chapters to go. I've got this fic on my list of things to finish during NaNo, because I don't follow the rules of a novel writing month. If everything goes as planned, I should be finishing this fic by the end of the year! 
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: A lot more spark problems and panic attacks on Artiu's part, as well as general emotional trauma from neglect and abuse.

It took Artiu two tries to actually trigger the door open, attempts made more difficult by the stares he could feel burning into the back of his helm. His hands were shaking as he tried again, and as soon as the door opened he started forward, desperate to be away.

The door didn’t slide open fast enough, or maybe he misjudged the gap. His shoulder slammed into the frame as he tried to hurry through. He didn’t dare to stop moving even as it had him staggering slightly. His HUD pinged at him in time with the throb of his shoulder armor.

Outside, he ducked his helm, not daring to look at any of the mechs moving along the walkway in case they had seen his ungraceful exit. Desperate not to attract attention, he picked a direction and started walking. His spark was spinning tighter and tighter circles in his chest, his vision was throwing off static, but he kept going. He would just… walk until his systems settled down.

The article from Ratchet’s journal kept coming to mind. Those designs. _His_ designs, he was sure of it, he’d spent what seemed like forever hunched over those designs, down to the last rushed minute. They’d been done enough to hand over to Shockswitch, but if he’d known—

Ratchet didn’t think it was his fault. Ratchet thought it was Shockswitch’s fault. Just thinking it made Artiu feel shaky. Shockswitch was his mentor, his guardian. Shockswitch had looked after him from the moment he was placed in his frame. He’d thought Ratchet was okay with his mentor, but now he knew that Ratchet hated Shockswitch just as much as Shockswitch hated the medic.

His vents seized, and Artiu stumbled to a halt as alerts in yellow and amber cascaded into his HUD. His engine was kicking into gear then cutting out again, and his vents clattered unevenly as he tried to cool his frame.

Oh, no. Oh no no no, not again, not this again. Artiu’s optic feed began to fuzz over with static, and through the crackles he stumbled his way over to the nearest wall and braced himself against it. A familiar alert demanded his attention. _Sparkmatter amplitude and frequency not registering. Energy levels outside safe parameters._

His spark and his systems were desynchronizing. His frame felt very clunky, all of a sudden, more like a hauler’s frame than his own. He thought he could feel his vents catching again. That was bad, he knew. He had to calm down, or he would be damaged. His spark might extinguish. But the commands to slow his systems seemed out of his grasp. His engine revved again, so hard he could feel it straining even through the fuzz.

Ratchet would know what to do.

Ratchet wasn’t here.

He struggled to remember what Ratchet had said last time. Shut down non-essential systems… he remembered it being done, but he couldn’t remember how. Ratchet had walked him through it, and the memories were a blur.

He didn’t even know if some of those systems could be disabled. His transformation protocols. His sensors. His comms…

His comms. Ratchet. He could comm Ratchet for help.

Pulling it up was blessedly simple, as Ratchet’s code was the only one he had, other than Shockswitch’s. Artiu curled over himself as his systems gave another spasm. Please, please…

The answer was instantaneous. “ _Artiu?”_

For a moment, he couldn’t think of what to say. Then, when he tried, his vocalizer wouldn’t activate for a long, frightening moment. “Ratchet,” he finally croaked. “My spark.”

Ratchet swore on the other end of the line, so vehemently that Artiu flinched. _“Where are you, kid?”_  

His optics were still feeding him static, but he lifted his helm and looked around. He couldn’t remember the turns he’d made when he left the café, and he didn’t know the area well enough to say. He’d wound up in some sort of side alley with no one around, just a few worn signs on the walls.

Ratchet didn’t sound frustrated when he stammered that out, though. _“I’m on my way,”_ he said instead. Artiu was afraid he would hang up, or tell him to deactivate his comms, but Ratchet didn’t do that. “ _It won’t take long,_ ” he said instead. Calm and even, like the first time Artiu had met him. _“Are you getting the same alerts as last time?”_

“Yes,” Artiu reported. “Less amber.” So far. Some of the alerts were edging that way, and his systems were still oscillating alarmingly. Ratchet kept talking into his comm, and Artiu knew he managed responses, but he couldn’t manage to keep the answers in his mind. The static faded in and out, and Artiu was swept along with it.

"Hey, kid." The voice, gruff but soft, penetrated the fog. "You'll be all right. Lean forward for me, brace your elbows on your knees."  

He found himself obeying, leaning forward to let his helm hang loosely. 

It was Ratchet, of course. It was impossible not to recognize his distinct rasp. But it wasn't the one he used when  arguing, or teaching. It was the same tone he'd used when he'd first met Artiu. It was soft, just as much as his hand Artiu's shoulder.

Some of the question repeated, he thought. The only one he really remembered was Ratchet asking to plug in a data cable. Then, slowly, his systems stopped fighting, and the alerts began to disappear from his vision. The fuzziness didn’t fade, but he drew closer to his frame, somehow. He was rubbing away the paint on his fingers again, he realized idly. He really should stop doing that.

"Doing better?" Ratchet asked eventually. Artiu nodded silently, and Ratchet lifted his hand away from his shoulder. 

"Here," he said. When Artiu looked up, he saw Ratchet holding a cube of energon out in his direction. 

"You'll need the energy," Ratchet explained. "Just drink it slowly." 

It didn't feel like his tanks were pinging him, but his systems were still adjusting. He poured the cube carefully into his intake, trying to keep his hands from shaking.He didn't know what to think or how to react. His cortex felt like it had been crumpled up and then pulled agonizingly back into place. His frame still felt laggy.

“Sorry,” he managed to mumble. He shouldn’t have called, he realized now. Ratchet hated Shockswitch. Had to be angry at him, too, for leaving so quickly. Ratchet had said a lot about being calm in front of a patient, but now that Artiu was better, it would come out.

... He was picking at the paint on his fingers again. Artiu jerked his hands away from each other, and curled his hands into guilty fists. 

A sigh brought his attention upward again. "Look..." Ratchet said. He was staring down at his hands too. It looked like he was struggling with something. His jaw worked. "I'm sorry for yelling at you like that, kid. I know your mentor means a lot to you." 

Artiu watched the medic, feeling his frame tense up as he waited for the rest of what Ratchet had to say. There had to be more of it. He couldn't have forgotten his anger that quickly. He would surely start making demands soon, and Artiu hated the thought, because he knew they would be demands that he could not meet. 

But Ratchet stayed silent for even longer, just staring at him in silent expectation. Artiu dropped his optics toward the ground, suddenly uncomfortable with his intense optics. 

It was only then that Ratchet reset his vocalizer and spoke again. "I want you to be safe, and part of that is being happy, but I can't make the decision of what that is for you." 

That made Artiu's helm jerk up. What did Ratchet mean by that? 

But Ratchet didn't seem about to explain. "How are your systems?" He asked instead. 

"They're--um." Artiu had to take a moment to check his HUD.  "It's all in the green." Was that why Ratchet was being nice? Because he didn't want to make Artiu's spark to go back into fluctuations?

"Good," Ratchet nodded. "Now, you should still take some time to rest before doing anything, in case there are still some hiccups to work out. How are your fuel levels?" 

"Better," Artiu admitted. His tanks still felt wobbly, though, and better wasn’t good. He probably should have had the energon before leaving the café.  

"Ratchet... Why are you doing this?" Artiu asked. The question slipped out before he could think better of it. 

Ratchet didn't seem surprised by it. "Because I want to make sure you get the help you need, kid." 

Artiu's tanks twisted up again. "I think," he said, pushing himself to his pedes, "I should go." 

Ratchet's faceplates were pinched into a frown, but he stood as well. "I…" he started to say, then bit it back.  "Don’t transform if you can help it. You should be resting as soon as you get back. Your systems and your spark will need time to recover." 

Artiu barely managed a nod.

“And, kid—“ Ratchet caught his optics, for barely a moment before Artiu had to look away. “You can always call me if you need to.”

“Okay,” Artiu mumbled. He got to his feet, still unable to look directly at Ratchet, as he pinged his map, then started back toward the University. He walked because even without Ratchet’s warning the thought of driving made him tremble.

The lab door was still locked when Artiu reached it, and he slumped in relief when he stepped inside to find all of the lights still off. Shockswitch wouldn't have anything to ask about. Just as well. Artiu wasn't sure how he could explain his current nerves without accidentally saying something about Ratchet, or outright lying.

Still, he didn't have much time before Shockswitch would be back from his lecture. He hurried about the lab, pulling out his tools and datapads, setting up the project he was meant to be working on. Some sort of power core, he’d been told. He didn’t know the details. Thinking about what they might be sent his processor into a queasy spin that had him turning away from his work.

He'd spent days trying to do the work in advance without cluing Shockswitch into what he was doing. It hadn't been as difficult as he had expected. Shockswitch had spent a great deal of time recently distracted, but he hadn't said much about it other than to make grumbled, disparaging comments about his colleagues and their ideas. Artiu had nodded along to the grumbling without comment to keep from Shockswitch further. Shockswitch got critical when he was irritated, and when there were no students around, he turned to correcting Artiu’s work.

He'd just settled down with his head bowed over a datapad to try studying some of the research papers Shockswitch had assigned to him instead of the power core, when the door to the lab slid open.

Artiu flinched despite himself, his spark fluttering with unease at the scowl on Shockswitch's features.

"Come with me, R2071," Shockswitch ordered, sweeping into the room. Artiu set his datapad down, optics widening.

"Um, is everything—"

"Fine," Shockswitch said stiffly. "Now put that _away_. We're leaving."

Artiu fumbled with his datapad to keep from asking the 'why' that desperately wanted to come out. Instead, he said, "did you still want to look over my work?"

Shockswitch barely glanced at it from whatever he was putting together at his own workstation. "The welds are shoddy," he said. "Redo it tomorrow."

It could have been worse. Artiu nodded silently and packed the prototype away, keeping a careful optic on Shockswitch, who was storming around, shutting down his desk and locking up drawers and cabinets with force. When he was finished with that, he swept out of the door, and Artiu was left to scramble after him once again.

 

"Leave me alone for a while, and don't make any noise," Shockswitch ordered, as soon as they came into the apartment. It was code for 'go to your room,' when it came to Shockswitch, so Aritu didn't even stop by the energon dispenser before heading to his quarters and closing the door firmly behind him.

He could hear the sound of Shockswitch prowling around in the main room, occasionally muttering words to himself that were too low for Artiu to make out. He didn't seem to be coming closer to Artiu's door, but with the sound outside, he couldn't quite bring himself to relax. He was shaking, from the drive or the incident with Ratchet he didn’t know which.

He sat down at his desk and powered on the same datapad he'd been reading before Shockswitch had entered the room. It was a treatise on the fundamentals of engineering, one that Shockswitch insisted was a cornerstone document in the field and one that he referenced often. He'd finally declared that Artiu had enough background knowledge to understand it, but despite that, Artiu had been finding it dense reading. Now was no better. His optics kept skipping over the words on the screen, rereading sections without comprehending any of their meaning.

Instead, Artiu's thoughts kept drifting back to the confrontation with Ratchet earlier that day. Just thinking about it made the anxiety in the pit of his frame mount again. What would Ratchet do about the disagreement? He hated Shockswitch enough that he might not tell him that Artiu had been disobeying orders to speak with him. Just the thought made Artiu's spark ache again, and he looked away from the screen to take a few deep vents. 

He couldn't think about it. If he did, he'd really be in trouble, without Ratchet to help with his spark. 

So he took deep vents, and stared at the words on the page until the static faded from the corners of his vision. 

Passage by ponderous passage, he made his way through the text, until his HUD started to blink in warning at him, reminding him that he needed to recharge.  _Rest_ , Ratchet had told him.

He stilled for a moment, listening again to the sounds in the hallway, but there was nothing. Shockswitch must have settled down onto one of the couches, since Artiu hadn't heard him returning to his own recharge quarters. 

Still, Artiu did his best to move quietly as he turned off the lights and crept over to his berth. Paused again, listening for Shockswitch. Laid himself down as slowly as he could, held even his vents as his frame settled. Then, between one vent and the next, recharge claimed him.

When he woke, it took his sensors a long time to realize that it wasn’t his internal alarm, but thudding against his door that woke him.

“Shockswitch?” he stammered.

“We’re leaving soon,” Shockswitch said. “Get out here.”

Apparently Shockswitch was back to normal. Artiu scrambled away from the berth, shaking his helm in an attempt to fully calibrate his sensors. His datapads were all tucked safely into his subspace except for the one he'd read from last night. He grabbed that, already moving, when the memories of yesterday hit him.

His vents hitched, but the sound of Shockswitch moving around in the hallway had him stumbling upright and moving out of the door. The last thing he wanted to do was to make them late.

Shockswitch was pacing in the entranceway when Artiu emerged, and he spared barely a glance in Artiu's direction before moving toward the door. "We're going to hit traffic. Some idiot flipped themself over right at the exit before ours."

Artiu watched Shockswitch nervously, but he didn't seem any more grouchy than usual. He certainly didn't act like he knew that Artiu had lied to him and specifically gone to visit someone he'd warned him not to see. The only thing he did was complain about the traffic, and ping Artiu grumpily when he’d been too slow in merging, intimidated by a rather pushy truck.

Even when they came into the offices Shockswitch only hurried them down to the lab without any words. It wasn't unusual for him to rush them directly down to the lab, especially if traffic had been particularly bad that day, but this was unusually quiet, even for him. 

"Get back to work," was his only order, as he stepped over to his own corner of the lab, "and don't bother me." 

Artiu nodded silently, and pulled out the power core prototype again. Apparently the irritable mood hadn’t been fixed overnight after all.

Just work. Focus on the work. He pulled out a scraper and bent himself over the worktable. Just focus on the work, he told himself, and don't think about anything or anyone else. 

 

It wasn’t easy to turn off his thoughts and just work, but it was easier than wondering about the designs. Easier than thinking about Ratchet, or trying to predict where Shockswitch’s mood would turn next. He was quieter, now, and the times he did talk, it was to snap at Artiu for doing something that didn’t meet his standards.

It was easier to turn off his thoughts during the day, now that there was more to do than ever. As Shockswitch deemed his work passable, he awarded Artiu with even more tasks, creating prototypes that kept him in their laboratory for hours, then working for hours longer in his room drafting designs. It left him barely enough time for recharge. There, it was easier not to think, not to try and predict where Shockswitch’s mood would turn next.

He should have been collapsing exhausted at the end of each day, but instead his helm filled with swirling thoughts every time he lay down, sickening, insidious things that made him curl up in worry. 

Sometimes he wondered about Ratchet. Other times he thought about his design in that journal article. He wondered if anyone had done anything about it. He wondered if anyone had done something about the design. Sometimes, he wondered how many mechs it had killed. 

He couldn't seem to turn the questions off no matter how hard he tried. Every new design was torture. He second guessed the purpose of every one, questioned his design decisions over and over again. He kept picturing them somewhere inside a mech's frame, and Ratchet's anatomy lessons came back to haunt him. 

All the while Shockswitch was there, telling him to work faster, to make more, to stop asking questions that he should know the answer to by now.

But he couldn’t turn those off either.

Still, it faded. Became a routine, almost. It was something he could live with, day after day, and as long as he kept calm and didn’t wonder too much about what happened to the work once he handed it over to Shockswitch his spark didn’t give him any trouble. There were warnings occasionally, but they were all yellow or chartreuse, and faded after a while if he ignored them. As long as nothing broke the rhythm of his days, he was fine.

So when he checked his University-issued comm one day to find a letter from Perceptor there, he nearly dropped his datapad in surprise.

A message from _Perceptor._ He quickly turned off the screen of the datapad and risked a glance toward Shockswitch. His mentor was on the other side of the main room of their apartment, engrossed in something he was writing. He didn’t seem to have noticed Artiu’s surprise.

He left the screen off anyway. He couldn’t read the message with Shockswitch here. Whatever the contents were, he didn’t trust himself not to react, which would draw questions from Shockswitch that he knew he couldn’t answer.

Instead he tucked the datapad away and turned his optics back to his energon, though his attention was no longer on it. Artiu couldn't imagine how Perceptor had gotten the contact information, unless Ratchet had handed it over. Why would Perceptor need to contact him in the first place? He’d been nice enough at the conference, but they’d only met each other once. What could possibly be in that letter?

He couldn’t read it now. There would be time when they got to the University and Shockswitch left to teach his classes. Artiu wondered briefly if he should just delete it, but he didn’t think he could bring himself to. He wanted to know.  

Shockswitch stood, a quick motion that made Artiu flinch and fumble his cube.

“Don’t spill that,” Shockswitch said, staring at the energon left in the cube. “In fact, finish it up now. It’s time to leave.”

“Yes, Shockswitch,” Artiu mumbled, ducking his helm. He quickly poured the rest of his cube into his intake, and followed Shockswitch out of the apartment. The last thing he needed was to irritate his guardian even more. He did his best to shake off thoughts of the letter. He could read it later—it was useless to think about it until then.

Then they were on the road, and Artiu couldn’t spare the thought for anything else. There was no room for anything but the road, and Shockswitch’s bumper ahead of him, especially since Shockswitch seemed determined to rush them. He dodged into narrow gaps in traffic, pulling ahead without signaling, and barely seemed to notice Artiu’s struggles to keep up.

By the time they left the highway for the University, Shockswitch was really pushing it, taking the curve of the ramp so sharply that Artiu thought he might spin out if he kept that pace. Artiu was already beginning to brake when something in his front axle started grinding, sending pain shooting along his undercarriage. He cried out as he started skidding. Stop, he had to stop, before he crashed—

He threw his brakes so dramatically that he fishtailed onto the shoulder, just barely missing the barrier at the edge. His spark was shuddering and his frame felt frozen in place, even though he could feel it shuddering as his engine revved harshly.

His spark would start fluctuating, he realized. He had to calm down. He cut his engine, focused on his spark and on his vents. Waited for both to slow, didn’t dare focus on anything else until the warnings began to fade away again. Slowly, he began to feel his frame again. He could feel the ache in his front axle, his frame running hot.

Shockswitch had to be nearby. The thought made Artiu jolt with panic, and try to transform, but the attempt was met with a fierce ache that made him stop. “I can’t transform,” he blurted out.

“You can’t what?” he heard Shockswitch begin to snap, but he was interrupted by another voice.

“Hmm. That might be a problem, but I think I have an idea why.” A brief touch to his hood brought Artiu’s attention to a mech standing before him.

“I should be able to help. Is something giving you trouble when you try to transform?”

“Yes,” Artiu stammered.

“First of all, what classification is your transformation sequence?”

His transformation sequence? He was almost certain it was one of the things that the medic had told him when he’d first been moved into this frame, but he couldn’t remember it now.

“He’s a Submodel three-tetra,” Shockswitch interjected. “ground vehicle, obviously.”

“All right,” the mech said, seemingly unperturbed by Shockswitch’s interruption. “Now, could you tell me where you felt the pain? Was it in your back left undercarriage?”

“No, my front axle,” Artiu said hesitantly.

The mech seemed to beam, even though they had a faceplate and visor covering their features. “That should be a lot easier to solve! Let me just get a jack and I think I can fix this in a jiffy.”

“Which means he should be able to drive?” Shockswitch asked, sounding heavily skeptical. He was looking down at the mech in disapproval as he sorted through a toolbox of some sort, then pulled out a tire jack from the depths.

“Oh, goodness no! But he should be able to transform, at least. He shouldn’t be driving on that axle anyway, anything hurting there is not a good sign.”

 “What it will do,” the mech continued, “is let him transform again, and eventually get over to a medic to get it looked at.”

“Right.” From the way Shockswitch said it, Artiu just knew that the medic visit would be a long time in coming, and his spark sank. Just the thought of trying to drive again was enough to make him shudder and want to sink lower on his wheels, except that the mech was setting the jack under his frame.

“Now, this may feel a bit odd, but remember, you’re quite secure!” they said, and began to crank the jack upwards. It was an uncomfortable situation, all right, being hoisted off the ground with a tire in the air, with no arms to steady himself with or legs to balance on. The mech didn’t move it that far up, though, and then he pulled back, to Artiu’s surprise.

“Here, this should only take a moment,” he said, before opening his chest and releasing some sort of… drone?

No, not a drone, a minibot. Or something even smaller than that, Artiu realized. It was shaped like a strange, darting creature, and promptly ducked under his chassis. Artiu could feel its paws tracing along his axle, until something made it pause. Fascinated, he used his sensors to track its progress, but it was being very polite, and very gentle.

“Ah,” the mech said. “Looks like some wrenched components… I believe I can get them approximately back into place, if you’d like?”

“Yes please,” Artiu said, before Shockswitch could say any of the things it looked like he was about to. His expression was sour, and he’d drawn away from their helper the moment the mech had released the little creature.

“Very well! Glit, you heard him,” the mech said, clapping their hands. The creature underneath Artiu’s chassis chirped, then with a surprising amount of strength started to tug at some components. He couldn’t feel exactly what the little mech was doing, but the pressure of it worked through his undercarriage. At least it didn’t set him rocking on the jack.

He could definitely feel the _snap_ of something moving… into place? Out of it? He honestly couldn’t tell, but the mech made a pleased noise when the little bot did that. “Ah, yes, that looks much better,” they said. Once the little mech scuttled out from under Artiu, they lowered the jack again until all four of his tires were resting on the ground. “Now, can you transform?”

Cautiously, Artiu began the transformation sequence. He kept waiting for something to jam or start hurting, but aside from an ache in his front axle, it actually went smoothly.

“Rough handling can make that happen now and then,” the mech was saying to him, and Artiu struggled to turn his attention back to that. “That’ll fix it for now, but I’d recommend going to a medic as soon as possible.”

“Thanks,” Artiu said. He glanced to Shockswitch, who didn’t look nearly as pleased. He could almost feel Shockswitch’s anger.

“Yes, quite,” Shockswitch said brusquely. “Now if you’ll excuse us, we have places to be.”

He didn’t step into the road and transform, to Artiu’s everlasting relief. He just started to walk away, with barely an acknowledging nod for the bot that had stopped to help them. Artiu had to hurry to keep up with him, and he only barely managed to turn and give the mech a wave as they hurried off.

The fuzzy feeling started to come back as Artiu watched Shockswitch’s back moving in front of him. He had to concentrate on his venting, instead of the lecture he was sure to get for making them late, again. This was the second time that he’d been forced to pull over, after all—his only consolation this time was that he hadn’t attracted the attention of an Enforcer. It might have been nice to have one here to force Shockswitch to let Artiu rest, but they were alone.

Instead, Shockswitch stopped them in the lobby. “You,” he ordered, “will go to my office. Once I’m done with class we will discuss… this.”

It froze him in place. The only thing that startled him into movement was Shockswitch actually grabbing him, squeezing at his arm hard enough that his armor felt ready to buckle under his grip. “Do you understand?” Shockswitch hissed.

Artiu must have nodded or something enough to satisfy Shockswitch—or maybe his mentor needed to go to his lecture. Whatever the case, he found himself shoved in the direction of the elevators, and once moving, he didn’t dare stop.

Shockswitch was going to be so angry.

The thought rang through his helm like it was blaring from a loudspeaker. Artiu had to tighten his armor down against his frame to keep it from rattling. Shockswitch was going to be angry, and he didn’t know what to do. Unless he somehow convinced Shockswitch to take him to a medic, this would happen again, and it would only get worse—

He was scared of Shockswitch, he realized with a shudder. Scared of what his _mentor_ was going to do to him if he failed again.

He couldn’t go wait in that lab. He _couldn’t._ Just the thought was making the static creep into his vision. He could feel his sparkpulse going erratic, and he had to lean himself up against the wall of the elevator. He needed help. He needed…

Ratchet. Ratchet could help him with his spark, he thought. The thought made him nervous after last time, after everything, but. Ratchet had helped him before, even after Artiu had run away from him. Ratchet could help, he repeated to himself. He just had to get there. The elevator could take him to the proper floor, he just needed to get there. Ratchet had to be there. He fumbled when pressing the right button, his hands were shaking.

Ratchet would be there, he kept telling himself as he waited. When the elevator’s door dinged, he stumbled his way out, vaguely grateful that he hadn’t run into anyone searching for it.

After his scant few lessons with Ratchet, the path to his office was still engraved in Artiu’s processor. He didn’t even have to think about it, until he came to the door and stopped dead.

There was a pile of boxes outside of Ratchet’s office. Artiu’s spark leaped into his throat, and he stumbled as he rushed forward. It was the end of the semester, he realized, terror growing. Ratchet had been mentioning that his attention was being pulled away from instructions. What if he’d decided to leave the university entirely, since Artiu had been ignoring him?

The door was propped open by a box. Artiu looked in to see Ratchet standing with his back to the door, picking up some datapads from his desk and slotting them into another box, one of the many that lined the office.

“Ratchet?”

The medic turned around, and Artiu saw the way his optics went wide. “Kid!” he said. He immediately dropped the datapads onto the desk. “You look like scrap,” he said, which prompted a watery, half-hysterical giggle from Artiu. “What’s wrong?”

Artiu’s shoulders hunched, and he wrapped his arms around his midsection. He could see Ratchet moving closer, a look of concern on his faceplates.

It was like he didn’t even care that Artiu had been ignoring him for almost a cycle. Like Ratchet didn’t actually hate him at all. The words caught in Artiu’s throat. The alerts blurred his vision of Ratchet’s faceplates. He squeezed his hands into fists as he forced himself to speak through a vocalizer clogged with static. “I need your help.”

 


	8. Ratchet: Do it better this time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now that he has it, Ratchet isn't going to waste this chance. Not when Artiu's life seems to be counting on it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At this point I'm just going to stop making any promises about this fic. I've learned my lesson. If you can't tell from the new chapter count, the plan has changed once again. 
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: medical issues and panic attacks in the vein of chapters 2 and 7, as well as discussion of a neglectful/abusive guardian from someone who still doesn't have distance from that situation. If there's a specific tag you think I'm missing from the fic tags as a whole, please let me know!
> 
> Also I've updated a lot of the chapter titles to something I hope works better for each one.

 “Kid?”

Ratchet reset his sensors in order to better take in the figure in his doorway. Alarm and confusion fused themselves together in his lines, driving him forward before the pitiful figure could begin to respond. Artiu’s arms were still wrapped around himself, though he looked like he should be clinging to the doorway instead. There was an unsteadiness to his stance, and he seemed to waver almost on the edge of fleeing. Artiu’s faceplate didn’t leave much room for expression, but his optics were edging toward feverishly bright.

 Artiu nodded but didn’t respond. Maybe he couldn’t—his voice had been more static than real speech, when he’d finally managed to force it out earlier. He hunched ever so slightly, as though he expected Ratchet to lash out at him for the lack. Ratchet forced himself to stop where he stood, even though he wanted nothing more than to go over and get a hand on the kid’s shoulder.

Instead he suppressed the familiar bubble of fury toward Shockswitch and tried to remove any irritation from his expression. He hadn’t restrained himself last time and that had brought him nothing but trouble. It seemed like the kid would bolt at the first sign of any kind of argument.

“You can come on in,” Ratchet told him. On second glance, he stepped back to start clearing the one chair in the office, picking up the stack of datapads currently sitting on it and shuffling them onto the already-cluttered desk. “Sit down, you look like you’re about to fall over.”

Artiu’s optics flickered with surprise, but he stumbled his way closer and dropped into the chair like a puppet with its strings cut. Ratchet took a few steps back. Not enough to put the desk in between them, but enough to keep from looming over the kid.

“Right,” he said, now that Artiu looked slightly less likely to fall over. “What do you need my help with?”

“You’re not… mad?” Artiu asked, still staring at him.

“At what?” Ratchet asked.

He’d meant it to be a rhetorical question, but before he could interject with anything else, Artiu curled miserably forward. “At me,” he mumbled.

It took more than a single moment for Ratchet to stamp down his reaction this time. He gritted his jaw tightly enough that he might have strained a few components in the process. “No,” he said finally, as calmly as he could manage. “I’m not angry with you.” He huffed. “I’m not happy with your mentor, but that’s not your fault.”

Artiu’s optics darted toward him, then away, but at least the kid didn’t shrink in on himself. His hands were curled tightly in his lap, scuffed and paint-chipped. Barring the electrical burns Ratchet had caught him with, it was the worst state Ratchet could ever remember seeing the kid in, and honestly, the rest of his frame didn’t look too much better.

Whatever had brought the kid to his office, had made him admit in some small way that something was wrong, it couldn’t be good. He’d been expecting to never talk to the kid again. Had, in fact, gotten extremely drunk with Ironhide in the wake of that botched café meeting. Ironhide had been gruffly sympathetic, for all that both of them knew there was nothing they could do now. If Artiu was still coming to Ratchet after _that_ …

Well. Ratchet hoped that it meant the kid still trusted him at least a little.

“I…” Whatever Artiu had struggled to say, it was cut off by a sudden and fitful rev from his engine. It startled the both of them, and Ratchet stepped forward as Artiu’s optics flickered fitfully.

“Never mind that for now, kid,” he said, unspooling a cable. “Let’s get you taken care of.” If Artiu’s spark was acting up again, dealing with that was Ratchet’s priority. Everything else could be worked out later.

Artiu uncovered his medical port without prompting. Ratchet plugged into it quickly, and knelt next to the chair, ignoring the grinding of his plating to throw all of his focus into the chaos of Artiu’s systems.

Now that he knew what he was looking for, it was easy to see the strain accumulated in Artiu’s systems and the frantic oscillation of a frame whose sensors weren’t registering its spark. Leading the spark chamber sensors through their reboot was tricky, but not impossible. Ratchet itched to run those sensors through a proper diagnostic. No doubt Artiu’s stress and fear weren’t helping his frame, but considering the sheer number of these incidents Artiu had gone through since Ratchet had met him—even if there weren’t more that Ratchet didn’t know about—actual damage to the spark chamber sensors was a dangerous possibility. It was something that Ratchet couldn’t do without a high-grade scanner, though, and that meant getting Artiu into a clinic. Ratchet dismissed that dream as he tracked the way the kid’s systems slowly started to reboot. There was already enough going on for the poor kid.

 By the time he heard the kid’s engine die down into a low, constant hum, Artiu looked about ready to tip over into recharge. Ratchet was loath to shake him out of it, but the office chair, Ratchet knew from experience, was not particularly comfortable.

“How are you doing, kid?” Ratchet asked.

Artiu’s optics cycled up, as he caught himself in the midst of a slow keel to the side. Ratchet caught him glancing around, as though he’d forgotten just where he was.

“Better,” Artiu said eventually. The static had left his voice, though he spoke quietly. “Everything’s back in the green.”

“Everything?” Ratchet echoed skeptically. He disconnected from Artiu’s systems and pushed himself back onto his pedes, this time allowing a faint groan at the creakiness in his joints.

Artiu winced. “I’m… kind of tired,” he mumbled.

“Why don’t you power down here for a while?” he suggested. “Pretty sure I’ve got an old fold-out recharge slab in here somewhere, and the closet’s mostly clear. There’s probably space for someone your size to stretch out there.”

Artiu startled. “Are you sure?” He asked. His voice quavered less than before, but Ratchet was fairly certain that was only because exhaustion overlaid it so thickly. “I can, I can go…”

“Yes, I’m sure. C’mon, you look about ready to collapse,” Ratchet said, before the kid could start thinking about where he did—or didn’t—have to go to. “It’ll be less busy in here than the lounges, especially if I close my door. I’ll be here for a while yet. I’ve got more sorting to do, but I’ll try and keep it down.”

Honestly, Ratchet wasn’t sure what he’d said that made Artiu relax, but the kid’s shoulders slumped. “If it’s okay with you,” he said.

“Of course it is,” Ratchet said. He reached out to pat Artiu’s shoulder, but pulled back before it could linger too long. “Now, where’s that cot…”

Fortunately, the cot hadn’t been packed away into one of the boxes already stacked outside of his office. Ratchet found it in a miscellaneous box half buried under a pile of loose styluses. Setting the cot up was a simple matter of unfolding it inside the closet itself, where it fit rather neatly. Ratchet stood up with a satisfied nod, and grabbed a few more things out of the shelves of the closet. “Here you go, kid,” he said, turning to look in Artiu’s direction. “This work for you?”

Artiu wavered his way over to the cot from the chair in slow, shuffling steps that made Ratchet glad the kid hadn’t insisted on leaving. He probably wouldn’t have made it down the hallway in this state. As it was, he barely seemed to look at the cot before he slowly flopped his way onto it. “Yeah, I think so,” he told Ratchet.

“Good. Now get some rest, kid.” Ratchet left him to settle down. He made his way over to the doorway, to close it and set the door’s message to a ‘do not disturb’ signal. His boxes were safe by the door, and if anyone needed him, they could comm. He didn’t want the open door to make Artiu nervous about who might pass by.

As he turned to make his way back to his desk, he was startled to find barely-lit optics fixed on him. He’d expected the kid to be in recharge for now, so he found himself pausing, waiting to see what the kid did. He was already curled up on his side on the cot, his helm resting on the crook of one arm, the other curled around the edge of the cot like it was an anchor.

“Thanks, Ratchet,” Artiu said quietly.

Ratchet’s spark twisted itself up into a very squirmy ache inside his chassis. “Sure thing, kid,” he says, gruffly. “Now you should get some rest.”

He completed his trip toward the desk and pretended to fiddle with some holo-models as he watched Artiu in his peripheral vision. It didn’t take long for Artiu’s optics to dim and his frame to relax as he  dropped into recharge.

As soon as Ratchet was sure the kid was out, he dragged a half-filled box off of his own chair. Shuffling the stacks of datapads on his desk around to make space without making noise was difficult, but eventually he managed to clear enough space to activate his console.

He had a lot of research to do, and not much time to do it.  

 

Trawling through the University’s records was never a fun task, but this time, unlike in previous attempts, Ratchet was armed with knowledge. He’d had little luck the last time he’d tried, but now he was armed with Artiu’s full serial number and a fuller knowledge of his connection to Shockswitch.

That didn’t mean Shockswitch hadn’t tried to hide his protégé’s information from the University’s directories, apparently. What little information Ratchet could find was unfortunately sparse. The personnel directory listed little more than his serial number and his position—A research assistant in an unnamed Engineering laboratory. There wasn’t even an image to accompany the name.

In most cases that would be where his search would end, but being a prominent medic from a globally renowned hospital had its perks, in the form of a few more tricks in Ratchet’s arsenal; access to some of the University’s internal paperwork, for example.

Even here, there was very little to go on. It looked like these records hadn’t been updated since Artiu had been put on the University’s roster, either. Most of it seemed only perfunctorily filled out. Half of it didn’t even have Artiu’s ident on it, just Shockswitch’s. Building access requests, affidavits of credentials, even personal residence forms all contained hints of Shockswitch’s influence.

Then he came to the filed medical records and Ratchet had to tamp down a hiss of anger. Then he had to swallow the urge to march his way right down to the Engineering department and give that _fragger_ what for.

Much of the information on those forms was redacted by the system, but what little was there was still enough to make Ratchet curl his hands into fists.

The clinic the medical report was from was possibly the shadiest that Iacon had yet to crack down on, and it had been skirting the line of ‘barely acceptable’ for as long as Ratchet had known of the place. Rumors abounded about the conduct of the medics and the conditions of the place, and they ranged from ‘unsavory’ to ‘blatantly illegal.’

With a place like that as the only clinic on file in his records, Artiu’s confusion about the specifics of his frame change suddenly made a great deal more sense.

So too did Artiu’s particularly severe frame dysphoria. Ratchet’s concerns about Artiu’s age aside, at a clinic like that the frame transfer might just have been rushed, rather than done incrementally in a way that would allow the spark to adjust to the new frame.

It would be something to ask Artiu about, sometime. Later, when the kid’d had plenty of time to recover.

Ratchet closed down those particular searches. Any more searching down that particular road and he’d either break his desk or break Shockswitch’s face the next time he saw the mech, and he still had plenty of research to do before Artiu finished resting.

 

It wasn’t actually that much longer before Ratchet was distracted from his work by a shuffling from the direction of his closet. He paused in his typing to glance over, and caught Artiu’s optics just lighting up, and the bewildered flicker before Artiu remembered where he was. Then he startled, pushing himself upright.

Ratchet turned away from his screen. “Everything alright?” he asked. The kid’s optics seemed to have a steadier glow after the rest, though he still looked tired and worn. Ratchet had to wonder how long it had been before the kid had even gotten his paint touched up.  

Artiu turned to him, and seemed at a loss for words for a few moments. One hand came up to rub at his helm. He looked like he wasn’t sure if he was awake or not. “I didn’t think I’d actually recharge,” he admitted.

“You needed the rest, after that. It takes a lot of energy, and your systems need the reset from proper recharge,” Ratchet said. “It’s why I offered the cot. You feeling better?”

Artiu paused in the midst of extricating himself from the closet, his optics flickering, presumably as he looked over his HUD.

“Yeah,” Artiu responded eventually. “A lot better.” He darted a look in Ratchet’s direction. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, kid,” Ratchet said. He beckoned Artiu over. “You want something to eat? I don’t have any fresh energon around here but I probably have some energy sticks around here. I haven’t finished cleaning out the desk yet.”

That caught Artiu’s attention, and he looked around at the scattered materials, half-packed around the office. “Are you… leaving?” he asked. There was a wobble to his voice.

“Not really. Just moving offices. I’ve got fewer classes in the next few semesters so I’m downgrading the space here.” He saw Artiu flinch, and winced himself. “I was going to send you an updated schedule before the move finished,” he added. “In case you wanted to swing by.”

He didn’t say that Artiu was the reason he’d kept an office in the first place, even though it was true. He didn’t need an office to work on a single course a semester, but he hadn’t been able to give up the teaching completely, and having a space where Artiu—or his students, but this particular incident had proved him right in his worry that the kid would need a place to hide away for a while—could sit alone with him and relax.

“Oh.” Artiu looked like he didn’t know exactly what to do with that information. He started rubbing one thumb along the other hand, looking around at the boxes again with a nervous energy. “Do you… need help moving things?”

“Kid,” Ratchet said, fixing him with his optics, “You don’t need an excuse to stay here if you’d… rather not be somewhere else.”

It was as diplomatic as Ratchet thought he could manage to say ‘avoid Shockswitch’ but he still half expected Artiu to make for the door. He caught the wince, and the increase in fidgeting, and sighed. Fine, he was going to have to work up to a frank conversation with the kid. Maybe he deserved it, for damaging Artiu’s trust in him. So he sighed and started moving some of the clutter off of his desk. “But if you want something to do, how about another lesson?”

That suggestion made Artiu perk right up. “You’re sure?” he asked. “You don’t have something else to do?”

“Nope,” Ratchet assured him. It wasn’t a lie, either. The whole reason his office was messy was because he’d decided to start sorting his materials before downgrading his office, but that could wait until later, if it had to. He’d moved by dumping his supplies into random boxes before. It just meant that his new office would start out more cluttered than he’d hoped for. “Here, come sit with me. What did we cover last time? I can’t remember where we finished.”

Artiu stepped up to the chair and tried to move a few stacks of datapads with more care than the old things probably deserved. “We were talking about fuel pumps,” he answered cautiously.

Ratchet thought about fuel pumps, and caught the slightly frayed look around Artiu’s optics, and decided that anything having to do with fuel pumps like the one in that journal was the last thing he wanted Artiu thinking about. “Right,” he said, ducking down to hunt for a holoprojector in the most recently moved box. “This time we’ll go over coolant systems and how they function in tandem with processors.”

He could see the way that made Artiu relax, to not have a mistake dragged up in front of him to be dissected. Ratchet pushed down another flash of irritation at the mentor that would do that, and pulled up a holoprojection of a standard processor. “Here,” he said, zooming in on it. “You’ve been doing work on circuits and power systems, haven’t you?” When Artiu nodded, Ratchet nudged the holo closer to him. “Why don’t you look over this and tell me what parts of it you think are most likely to overheat, then.”

Artiu was hesitant, at first, as he scanned over the image, but eventually he poked at one part of the holo. “Here?” he suggested cautiously.

“Yep,” Ratchet said. He pulled out a stylus, and poked through the illusion to the point Aritu had picked out. “Those are the sensory suite connections. Lots of activity going on there, all the time, and if the external sensors are damaged, this area of the processor can go into overdrive, trying to compensate. What made you say it?”

“Well, the arrangement, and the circuits connecting to it,” Artiu said.

“Right, good.” Ratchet tapped the projection again. “And if you were cooling this section off, how would you do it?”

They worked their way through the processor, section by section. It didn’t take Artiu long to figure out the problem spots, and even to begin theorizing on the ways different processor builds might be arranged, and it calmed some of his nervous fidgeting, though it didn’t stop him from glancing over his shoulder toward the door every so often.

From there, it was easy to move into temperature maintenance.

“The need to separate the processor from the heat-generating mechanisms surrounding the spark is considered the reason most standard mechanoid forms have a distinct helm divided from the chassis. Proximity to the processor is also the reason many primary sensory systems are located in the helm,” Ratchet said, turning the hologram, then zooming out to show the helm around the processor. “Of course, even within the cranial space of the helm there’s the possibility of overheating, and the need for a compact space means that cooling cannot be evenly distributed. Given the current processor design, how would you set up cooling?”

“Tubes of coolant, maybe?” Artiu suggested. He grabbed a hard light pen and started adding lines to the projector. “That way they can get below the surface of the processor quickly, without waiting on fan convection… I’d keep sensory alerts on different processes, so if one starts overheating they don’t all go at the same time. Emergency functions obviously need to be functioning longer… does it make sense to put them at the surface?”

“From a certain angle, it does,” Ratchet noted. “The surface of the processor is more easily cooled. But it’s also prone to damage. It’s the curse of having our helms separate from the rest of our frames. Even with the relatively sturdy armor of our helms, they’re unfortunately prone to damage.”

Artiu fell silent, his fidgeting starting up again as he stared at the model of a processor before him. “Do you know…” he mumbled, “how to tell if a processor is built wrong?”

“What do you mean, wrong?” Ratchet asked, though he had a sinking suspicion.

Artiu’s fidgeting didn’t help that impression, and he seemed to be struggling with his words, so Ratchet took pity on him. “First of all, even with a standard general layout, individual processors vary greatly from one another, depending on a multitude of factors, including adaption. Now, sometimes processors can be built wrong in the sense that major sectors are missing, or they cause terminal feedback loops, or are not properly connected in a way that allows communication between sections. In that case, corrective surgery might be employed. In other cases, adverse functioning due to processor layout can be dealt with with the help of a therapist or a dose of neuropath building nanites. Maybe in the past processor repair was unrefined enough that alternative processor build would be a problem, but that’s just ridiculous now. Anyone who says that processors are just built wrong doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

By the time he’d finished, Artiu was staring at him like he’d just claimed to be Primus in the metal.

“But, if you don’t live up to your function…” he stammered.

“That’s a bit complicated,” Ratchet said. “But—listen, kid—no one’s perfect at their function their first go. There’s always training, even for me. It took forever before I ever touched another ‘former in a medical capacity. The same’s true of studying. And if anyone’s tried to tell you you’re bad at your function for not knowing something already, they’re spouting a load of slag.”

He was pushing the boundaries again, but this time, Artiu didn’t look nervous about the implied slight to his mentor. He looked shaken to his spark, though, and Ratchet reached out to grab his hand and squeeze it. His arm interrupted the beam of the holoprojector, making the image dissapate into sparkling blue fractals that wavered in the space in between them. He watched as Artiu took a shaky invent, then released it. His optics flickered, as he hunched up in place.

When he finally spoke, it came out of him like an energon leak, dripping and painful. “I think—I could live with being bad at it. At making things,” he said, slowly. “But I can’t—I can’t let something I made hurt anyone. I just—can’t.”

Ratchet squeezed the kid’s hand again, felt Artiu squeeze back. It seemed to relax him, at least a little.

“But Shockswitch,” And Artiu nearly choked on the name, “will be so mad if I try and tell him what to do. He’s the one who’s supposed to make decisions, and I just do what he tells me. He’s the professor, I’m just supposed to be his assistant. I’m working for him. If I told him no…”

“How bad is it?” Ratchet asked.

Artiu looked at him blankly, so Ratchet continued. “You can come with me, right now. Stay at my place where he can’t get to you, and deal with the legal parts later.”

Artiu’s optics went wide and frightened. “He’d come after me,” he said, shuddering. “Or he’d send an Enforcer. He’d be so _mad._ ”

“You’re your own mechanism once you’re in your adult frame. If you’re not in danger or distress where you are, an Enforcer can’t force you to go back. And Shockswitch doesn’t have to know where you are.”

Artiu was shivering now, so Ratchet squeezed his hand again.

“It’s all up to you, kid. I’m here to help you. If you want to go back to working with him, I’ll support you. I just want to make sure you’re safe, and happy, and right now it doesn’t seem like you’re any of those things.”

“I…” Artiu said, then winced. Ratchet waited quietly, patiently. He felt the kid’s fingers curl against his, twitching as though he was trying to fidget but couldn’t.

“I don’t want him to be able to come after me. And I… I don’t think I can go back.” He shuddered again. “How do I do that?”

Ratchet’s spark felt like a solar flare. He couldn’t stop himself from slumping in his chair, and smiling at the kid. “That’s good, kid,” he said, with another hand squeeze. “I’m proud of you.”

He could hear the way it made Artiu’s engine choke. “Proud?” he stammered.

“Proud,” Ratchet agreed. “It takes a lot of courage to strike out on your own.”

Artiu’s only response was a choked burst of static, as his optics began to fizz slightly with plasma bursts. His free hand flew up to cover his faceplates as his shoulders shook, but the hand curled in Ratchet’s maintained a grip so tight it was almost painful.

Ratchet squeezed back, brought his other hand up to pat the kid’s arm. “It’s okay,” he said, past the static edging into his own voice. “It’s going to be okay.”

 

They sat like that for… a while. Ratchet honestly couldn’t say how long the silence lasted, how long it took for Artiu’s shaking to stop, but it didn’t matter. By the time Artiu finally moved his hand away from his faceplate, he looked wrung out, and Ratchet didn’t feel much better than Artiu looked. He loosened his grip on the kid’s hand, waited for him to finally slip it away and start rubbing at his faceplate before he moved it off of the table, tapping the holoprojector off as he did.

“Doing okay?” he asked. His voice felt scratchy and raw, and it probably didn’t sound much better.

“I’m feeling, um. Floaty?” Artiu said. He dropped his hands into his lap. “Not tired. Lighter, I think. My systems are still fine.”

Ratchet wondered if the kid had ever had a good cry before. “That’s good,” he told him. “You think you’re up for talking?”

“I think so,” Artiu said, though Ratchet caught his shoulders hunching slightly. “I just don’t know what to do.”

“I won’t lie—since you’re his student, there’ll be a lot of paperwork you’ll have to do to completely disconnect yourself from him,” Ratchet explained. He turned to the side and tapped at his console, bringing up the documents his research found. There were some things he hadn’t had time to find. Legal documents about intellectual property theft and misuse of ideas, those would have to come from someone who knew about that sort of thing, if Artiu even decided that he wanted to fight Shockswitch for his designs. That, Ratchet would wait to bring up. For now, it was triage mode.

 “Here, drag that chair around, we can get you started on some of the forms,” he said.

Artiu came around the desk, slowly pulling the chair with him. “How will that help?” he asked.

“As far as the law’s concerned, the only contract between you and Shockswitch is you working for him at the University, since you’re fully framed. Shockswitch may have needed to personally approve of the upgrade in your status to his assistant, but as far as the University is concerned, it only takes your word for you to quit,” Ratchet explained. “Once that’s done, he doesn’t have any hold on you.”

Artiu shivered, and panic began to tinge his field. “But what do I do after that?” he asked. His hands were wringing again. “I don’t know where I’d live or how I’d work, or anything.”

 “It’s not much of a place, but I do have an apartment you could stay in until you figure something out,” Ratchet said. “And don’t you even think about owing me something for it, kid.”

Ratchet beckoned Artiu closer. “Here, look. Seems like he signed off on making you an assistant professor,” he noted, sorting through the files. “And there’s several certifications in Engineering, as well.” He shifted so that Artiu could peer over his shoulder at the documents. “Do you remember taking the tests?”

“I… yeah.” Artiu was nearly stammering, and when Ratchet glanced over his shoulder at him, he looked dazed. “Shockswitch made me take a lot of them, but he never said what they were for.”

“Well, since these certifications were issued in your name, you have plenty that you could find a job with,” Ratchet noted. “I don’t know which ones are considered useful for what, but they’ll help you.”

Artiu was still staring at the screen. “I didn’t think…” he started to say, then shook his head. “If I’m an assistant professor, does that mean… it means I should be getting paid, right?”

Ratchet felt his tank constrict. It wasn’t that it was a surprise, exactly, that Shockswitch had been stealing the wages of his protégé, but that Artiu hadn’t even known that he was being paid, that Shockswitch hadn’t tried to justify it with some excuse about being Artiu’s mentor—

Every passing moment made Ratchet more intensely glad that Artiu was here in his office.

“You should be, but I don’t know what Shockswitch has done with them,” he admitted. “You might not be able to count on that, especially if he got your signature on something signing them away to him.”

Artiu crumpled slightly, then shored himself up again. “Okay,” he mumbled. “I should… probably have expected that.”

“You don’t have to worry about it, kid,” Ratchet said. “I told you, I’ll help you out. Right now is about making sure you’re safe. You can worry about supporting yourself once you’re away from it all. You’re not in it alone.”

Artiu’s optics cycled, but he nodded. “Okay. I… okay.”

Ratchet patted his arm, sympathetically. “What about at your things?” he asked. “Anything you need to get from your residence before this begins?”

There was a long moment of hesitation from Artiu, who started rubbing at the scuffed paint on his hands. “I… no,” he shook his helm. “There’s nothing that I need to go get.”

He didn’t press, but Ratchet counted it as another mark against Shockswitch, and resolved to take get Artiu out somewhere beyond the University sometime. Maybe he could get Ironhide to suggest some things that the kid might like. If Ratchet was any judge of things, the kid could do with having something that was his and his alone.

“In that case, we can get started,” he said, tapping at the console. “Here, come on up, you’ll need to fill this—kid?”

Ratchet glanced back to find the kid, sitting stiffly in his chair. Artiu turned toward Ratchet with wide optics, spitting static as he struggled to get his vocalizer to work. “He’s calling me.”

Ratchet’s lines filled with ice. “You don’t have to answer,” he said, alarm rising. “Kid, just let him wait.”

Artiu shook his helm, violently. His shoulders hunched. “No, I—I can’t, I already…”

Ratchet bit back a swear. He leaned forward to get a hand on Artiu’s shoulder, but the gesture did little to stop the tension that was winding Artiu up like a coiled spring. The kid’s arms wrapped around himself, digging into the plating of his sides as his optics went overbright and unfocused. Ratchet felt just as tense, watching Artiu slide right into panic. He kept flinching, and his engine was starting up a dangerous whine.

“Kid,” Ratchet urged, squeezing his shoulder. “Kid, listen to me, you need to hang up. You’re going to push your frame into another disconnect.”

Artiu’s optics flickered off, and he shook his helm again.  “He—he knows,” Artiu stammered. His voice was so thick with static that Ratchet could barely understand him. “He’s coming, he’s going to—“

“ _Frag_ ,” Ratchet hissed. “Right. I’ll deal with him. Kid, you stay back here, all right? Focus on keeping your systems steady, okay? I won’t let him do anything to you.”

Before Ratchet could say anything more, there was a knock on the door so forceful that Ratchet could hear it rattle. Artiu let out a little whimper and curled forward in the chair, his fans screaming as he clutched at his helm. Ratchet put himself in front of the kid as the knocking continued, each one as strong as the first. He could hear shouting on the other side of the door now, loud and angry and hard to make out, but even though Ratchet had only heard it a few times, he recognized it instantly.

“R2071!” Shockswitch shouted from outside. “Open this door immediately!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the cliffhanger! As always, I absolutely plan on seeing this fic through to completion, but I can't give a specific timeframe for that.


End file.
